It just gets worse

Now I just heard that my friend's cat has just died. That cat was no older than my cats, and wasn't sick at all or giving them any clues he was about to keel over in the middle of the night. *whimper.*

Ok, I know a cat is not to be compared with the sudden death of one of your colleagues, but it is just one more thing to add to a very depressing and overwhelmed semester already. And I won't even get into how exhausted I feel or how, even though I just had thanksgiving break, I feel completely unmotivated and unable to grade any of these huge piles ---- my friend here has been pretty close, and we have both been too busy to even meet up and drink and bitch about things. The last thing she mentioned to me was that she had been a bit too depressed to deal with people this semester,  and now she has lost her cat too. Sigh. I think the other postdocs got together on Friday and now I feel bad I did not wake up and go visit them --- but I got home from class, mapped til 9, then went back to bed at 11, and still couldn't get the energy to clean anything or get up or grade anything yesterday. Today I at least got some stuff done, but not without a lot of procrastination and just sitting there.

I also have to start christmas shopping soon. And think about what I am going to pack for break --- including thinking about MLA or not and packing for that but not knowing if I'm gonna go --- and thinking about spring class prep and about a million other things. And deal with my car which has been acting up. And write all my finals instead of procrastinating by updating the dates on some of the spring syllabuses. Sigh. There are still a bunch of late December job apps I printed out too. I remember missing a lot of the deadlines last fall by this time (roughly) last semester but so far this time I only missed one. That's something anyway.

I think I need to go reread Barthelme's "The School." It's about time for the new gerbil to walk into my life.