Some time has passed and you realize that you have not asked yourself “why am I still alive?” Indeed, you have long stretches of time in which you feel not so bad in being alive. You chalk this up to your incredible skills of denial. The future, after all, remains unimaginable and without hope.

You allow yourself to research more than you ever have before during the semester. You let it become the productive procrastination. You let it occupy your thoughts as you jog. Indeed, jogging has shifted to the point at which you no longer feed the body dysmorphia so much as you feed your mood. You feel like you live in your own body again, rather than a blob. Now that you think about it, with these two parts together, researching makes you feel like you are in your own mind, too. In the evenings, falling into a serial t.v. show or doing a puzzle with the Eminent Historian or reading an absorbing novel makes you feel you are in your own mind, as well, just another part.

This is now, and you can jump from one to the other in seconds.

The program running in your background is teaching — online teaching, which is to say grading. Constant grading of the same answers to the same assignments, making the same comments, with no hope of making any dent in anything except this constant grading. It’s an assembly line, followed by constant e-mails from students who couldn’t upload this or (for this you are truly sympathetic) have horrible crises at home, or (for this you are not sympathetic) do not follow instructions. All of which ends up in assignments in three different places, and troubleshooting the online platform, and adjusting due dates and accommodations, and having to remember what for whom and where, and your emotions drain and drain and drain.

You do this with e-mails dropping into your in-box offering funds for “racial justice” initiative, just not for you or your classes or anything you do. They are only for the newly “woke,” those who just discovered racism exists and maybe they can address it in their classes. Fuck all of those who already do that, who aren’t noticed as doing that in the first place. This is where you wonder, “what am I for?” This is the type of thing that ruins what little time you feel you have left in the world.

So, when you can, you ignore that pile of grading. You research. Or work in the yard. Or research. Or go for a jog. Or research. You enjoy the time left.