With all oddness and tumult

Today is one of those days... one of those days where you just don't feel in sync with the movement of the world around you.  I work in the field of education and today starts new classes for the students at one of my jobs (I have a full-time and a part-time).  So after a few weeks of quiet and solitude, the building is now buzzing again with young adults and their very unique concerns ("Like, oh my god, she did NOT buy the same Uggs as you!  Seriously?  She did?  Ugh, what a bitch!"  Seriously?  Biggest concern?).  It's also the first real day of work after the holidays and there's a bit of that post-holiday depression, by which I mean there really is a depression, an indent, a lack, where the holiday spirit was.  It's all back to work and the grind now.  Also, my brother flies back to Florida today for his final semester of law school.  It looks like he will be moving back to NJ when he's done, so hopefully this is the last of these good-byes there will be for a long time.  I cannot describe how hard it has been to let him go back every semester because I will cry and tears are not something I have time for right now.  (I miss having an office with a door.)

So there's this swirl of sensations in my heart and gut today, complicated further by listening to the students talk about their lives and remembering, like it was yesterday, what it was like to return to school after the winter break.  What I wouldn't give to be a grad student forever (without the financial ruin of all those student loans, of course).  I'm really not "feeling it" for my job today and sorely miss my old lives: both that of a grad student and, prior to that, my other job in academic administration (which I left because it wasn't in the field I desired).

Usually I feel really uplifted by the start of a new year, but this year feels like it has all the lift of a lead balloon.  My husband needs a permanent job or we can't afford to move out of my parents' house.  I need to find more joy in my present circumstances because I am not the sort who can live with being unhappy upon daily waking.  My 101 in 1001 list is helping because it gives me a purpose, however artificial that purpose might seem.  My goals have always involved self-improvement, usually through education, and this list involves a lot of work towards self-improvement.  It's kind of like having my own life syllabus for the next 33 months.  I am a syllabus junkie, so that is probably why this works so well.

I was looking for a poem that could adequately delineate how I feel today, but I did not find one during my somewhat brief search.  I did, though, find this work by one of my favorite writers, Margaret Atwood, and it moved me today (as her work never fails to do).  It's tapping into some of what I'm feeling without getting at it exactly:

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

~~~~

Since I couldn't find a poem that taps into exactly what I'm feeling today, perhaps that means I should attempt one myself.  I do feel something from the subject line of this post.  Maybe it can become something more.