Sunday, Oct. 05, 2003
My battle with ennui, posted at 1:50 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com It's been a strange, short weekend. I worked Friday night, but was the first one cut because I felt sick. I had made $8 on a 2-top table, and that was it. Yesterday, I spent almost the entire day in solitude, escaping only for a lengthy trip to the gym (trying to sweat my cold out... and it worked) and Trader Joe's. I had big plans to attend the Fell's Point Festival, but that fell through when no one called me and my inspiration to call others lagged as well.I'm battling ennui right now. I seem to be in an unexciting pattern, and the days of solitude don't much help. Calls back to Michigan are fruitless. Trying to catch up with Baltimore friends when I feel like doing something - not as often as usual - never seems to work out. Right now, I'm yearning for some sort of upheaval of the soil beneath me, some sort of change to envigorate my soul.
I'm not sure what it all means. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this year is a pinnacle year in my career here in Baltimore. I'm basically happy at my school, but I admit to restlessness felt after teaching nothing but low-level 9th graders for three years in a row, especially after seeing colleagues with less experience and less tenure getting a diversity of classes to teach. It's not that I don't want to teach freshmen - I still do - but I wanted another prep this year to mix it up, and I didn't get it.
The baseball coaching position opening is one that I'm going to try my hardest to grab, because that could be something to reinvigorate me. But I'm worried about trying too hard, because, in all honesty, if I'm passed over for it I might just leave the school.
I think that I'm putting too much stock into my teaching position right now. At this point in my life, I'm deriving most of my personal happiness from my job, and not my relationships with others. People keep disappointing me. Everyone's nice and all, but lately I'm getting a feeling that they're more important to me than vice versa. I would like to have a girlfriend, to have someone to be close with, but there are no prospects and I tend to only be attracted to the unattainable (like the amazing Polish girl at the restaurant who has a live-in boyfriend, or the new teacher in my department, who, as I was flirting with her, came otu of the closet to me) rather than the immediately attainable (the girl who bats her eyes at me behind the counter at Bally's).
My confidence has waned a bit in recent months, making me not much of a catch at the moment. The only time when I've been successful with girls - for a brief but fun period that began the summer of 2002 and ended rather predictably in March 2003 - I was sort of a jerk with them. I would go to a bar, sometimes alone, and find the first one who maintained eye contact with me for more than one glance. After I had them in my sights, it would only be a little more work and I could usually get them to leave with me. It felt empty and my brief bout with promiscuity crammed into eight months - a period in which I made up for my almost total celibacy when I weighed 300 lbs in college - ended quietly in March.
Anyhow, being nice and unassuming has never worked for me. I'm back to the gym now with a vengeance - every part of my body is sore - in the hopes that I'll regain that cockiness that I had last year. I'm not sure where it'll lead me, but I'm hoping it'll be to a place where my fulfillment with my personal life at least rivals that of my professional life. My biological clock isn't just clicking right now; it's sounding alarms.