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makes me happy, tonight at least. It means no last minute complex problems with the assignment which was due today.

I finished writing finals. Still feeling a strangely OCD-like insecurity that the exam is not this week. It's like the reverse of the dream where you show up to class and find out it's the final and you have no recollection of ever going to this class. It's like that but in reverse. I keep thinking "my god, it can't be this week!" and running off to indirectly confirm this somehow.

I do believe this may be a sign I am cracking up.

Sometimes my breakdowns sneak up on me, I suspect they seem so unexpected because it would not be inaccurate to say my days consist in no small part of periods of rage, hillarity, ecstacy, and painfully over-intense self and intimate other scrutiny. So how am I to judge a deviation from this normal uneven keel? It's the little things like repeatedly not believing your exam is this week although you know it is (or do you?) that sometimes signal "hey you're freaking out".

I got into campus late today and left early. I had been planning to cancel my shrink's appointment so I could finish my exams and possibly squeeze in a little research-based work. Just a smidge, I told myself. I've found small goals are easier to feel less disappointed about if they are not acheived. I hadn't counted on the flood.

When I got in, my lab was wet and somewhat rearranged. Most of my stuff was pulled out from the wall and sort of haphazardly tucked here and there on the dry patches of carpet around the room. Brittney the undergrad sat reading Greek tragedies and drying her sopping sneakers on a forbidden space heater. She told me the office had flooded "mostly in that corner" she added, nodding towards my desk.

As the rain was coming down sideways last night, it apparently got in through the walls. "Cement is pourous you know" one of the building management people told my lab mate Sharon. We hadn't realized pourous meant seivelike. Fortunately, it doesn't look like any equipment or data was damaged.

However, my stuff is another story. Most of the water was concentrated to an area around and under my desk, incuding a book case next to my desk. The under the bookcase water hadn't been touched by the guys who wet vacced earlier in the day. Ok, minor distraction. I'll handle this and then get to work, I thought.

I asked the departmental secretary about how to arrange for the wet vacc guys to come back and get under the book case so we don't get mold in our lab. The secretary said I should move the bookcase out of the way and that she'd call the vacc guys to come back tonight "or tomorrow morning". The problem is, I can't move that shit. There was a time when I would have thought nothing of moving furniture by myself. I routinely would rearrange my dorm room - shifting beds, desks, and dressers even, by myself. Yes, I was tired and and a little sore after but it was a good feeling to have things where I wanted them and to have gotten them there without having to ask some strapping young man or woman to come aid me.

These days I don't even carry the fucking laundry up and down the stairs without screwing my hip for a week. Some days I'm ok-ish with these limitations, some days I'm not. Some days, I am sore before I even thought of them, and on those days I find I quite strongly dislike the reminder of the disability which goes with the infirmity. I seriously wanted to take my dislike out on the secretary. She sucks at her job and she makes many people's lives quite difficult through her obstinate incompetency, but it is against my principles to pick on someone so clearly deficient simply to satisfy a cranky mood.

I resigned myself to rounding up some strappers, relative or real. None of the usual suspects were around which left just me, the undergrad who had just the other day been telling me about her impending surgery to address her severe carpal tunnel syndrome, and Sharon my lab mate who had an accident two years ago which severed tendons in her arm. My god our lab is fucked.

I wandered down into the further reaches of my floor, where the grad students who do strange experiments involving pendulums and gym shorts reside. Remarkably few people were around. It was spookily quiet and smelled like wet departmental rug and 2 day old sweat pants.

Not happening. None of it. I would get not even a smidge of work done in there today. If I stayed, I would feel obliged to address the water, which was seeming to be increasingly unaddressable.

I gave up. I decided I should leave, go see my therapist, and then go home and work. On my way out I ran into four people from my program who asked me if I was staying for a defense of a dissertation on "touching things, lots".

Saying no in a tired and apologetic voice is usually sufficient but not today. I guess today was special. Today there were follow up questions. By the time I reached the ground floor of my building, I was answering their queries by loudly stating "I am leaving because I NEED to go to PSYCHOTHERAPY so I don't snap at people for no apparent reason"

But I am home and I am done. I had dinner, ate cookies, and tried not to think about things like mold, disability, and what I'll say to my students if it turns out the exam isn't tomorrow.