BLECCCCHHHHH! ACK! OOP! THPFTTT!

The semester starts for me tomorrow, and I'm having my annual complete freak-out, replete with full-blown anxiety attack today. You know, all the good stuff: the dry heaves, the feeling that a Rhino is standing on my chest, the imagined feel of a metal cord cinching ever tighter around my head.

Therapy, you say? Well, if I were supremely organized, my syllabi would be done and ready to go, and I'd sneak out to watch Jason Bourne kicking some Black Briar Butt. But, as it is, the syllabi need to be polished, and the carpool meets tomorrow extra-early, so that option's not in the cards. (Add to that the Baconator's sudden interest in pitching for the Devil Rays, and a full blown panic attack is called for.)

So I've popped into itunes a playlist of sacred music: nothing like all-Monks, all the time, in Latin no less to calm my torpidly perturbed spirit.

It's weird to me, but I love to teach, and am good at it. But the act of preparing to teach has, as I have gotten older, become increasingly difficult, bordering occasionally on the terrifying. Which is weird, because public lectures are not a problem--even lectures in some pretty high profile places with high stakes audiences, while nerve racking, don't existentially bother me at all. But for some reason, the act of getting myself into the physical classroom at my school fills me with foreboding and dread completely and absolutely disproportionate to what the rational portion of my brain knows to be true.

Part of it might be just the process of getting old. I started teaching full time as a professor when I was (only) 28, and I'm now 41. Except for the occasional morning pain in the knees, I wouldn't change places, under any circumstances. I was never "cool," nor did I ever try to define myself as part of the "young and hip" crowd on the faculty. About six years ago or so I realized when doing the academic procession, "hey, I'm no longer at the back of the line," and I was never part of the hip crowd, I was no longer part of the young one either. That didn't bother me---in fact, it was something of a relief. The students stopped coming by to chat all the time, which made things somewhat easier to get things done, and to get home to the growing family. But what I've noticed this year for the first time is that I feel old from a technological and pedagogical perspective. I thought I'd been keeping up on new developments not just in the field but on the support side of things, but while I hold my own in the field, on the "new methods" side, I feel like Grandpa Simpson. Is that what's causing the anxiety? No, because it's been going on for awhile. Is it a contributing factor? Yes, I think it is.

What to do about it? I don't know, just do what I know how to do. This feeling usually passes with the beginning of the semester, or, at the very minimum, is at its worst just before it starts.

It's funny, because all summer I've looked forward to the semester starting. The past two years have been a professional hades, followed by the wilderness. I've worked very hard to get our department restocked, rebalanced, reloaded, and in effect restarted, which has worked better than I could have hoped for. So why does that leave me sitting here, the night before the semester starts, feeling like I have a ginormous flem-coated ice-cold rock sitting at the bottom of my stomach?

Yeah, I know, suck it up.