Tomorrow is Friday, and today that feels significant. This has been one of the odder weeks I’ve lived through. It began with a Monday that seemed bent on showing me my place in the world and emphasizing quite pointedly that that place is more than a little lower than the angels. After valiantly keeping my head above water for 10 hours I finally gave in and went home, only to find that it really is true that you shouldn’t post anything to an online forum when you’re that tired and out of sorts. Oh well. I doubt that my moment of pettiness will have lasting consequences. That doesn’t stop me from regretting it, though.

Tuesday started out on a better foot (at least, after the early-morning dentist appointment), but just when it had lulled me into a false sense of security, it walloped me even harder than Monday had. At the end of what turned out to be 12 hours of work spread out over nearly 15 hours of the day, I got an email that forced me to confront someone I’ve been avoiding for months, tell him why I’d been avoiding him, and do it all as gently as I could (because he’s basically a nice guy). Confrontation and I don’t get along. Not even relatively benign confrontation like this. By the time I was done writing the two short paragraphs that I ended up sending, I was shaking and perilously near tears, right there in the middle of a bustling room of students. And it wasn’t just that I knew that even the direct-but-gentle email that I was writing would probably really hurt this guy, it was also the renewed realization that the behaviors that I find most frustrating in him are behaviors that I also exhibit from time to time. Reality checks like that are important but terribly painful, and this one seems to have hit me at a particularly vulnerable spot because I was still wrestling my insecurities into submission after several hours of lying awake in bed.

Which brings us to Wednesday when, by noon and after a few interrupted hours of sleep, I had taught two classes, met with a couple of students, and been notified that I’d been nominated to be The Big Cheese at an institution I’ve always respected from afar. I almost deleted that notification, thinking it was a prank. But apparently it’s not. I still think they don’t realize quite how under-qualified I am, but it’s mighty flattering, nonetheless. But more on that in a bit. Wednesday finally wrapped up (11 hours after it began) with another intense email conversation, this time about religion, of all things. It was one of those emails that I spent the entire car ride home composing, and couldn’t get right until well after a late dinner.

Thursday, today, featured the wrapping-up of all the most dramatic threads of the week. I wrote to that respected institution to tell them that I’m happy where I am, underqualified to be a Big Cheese, but won’t glibly turn down their invitation to talk with them further if they still think it’s appropriate and desirable. Meanwhile, I finally figured out and executed a task that’s complicated both functionally and politically, wrapped up the intense email exchange about religion, and talked for half an hour with the search committee that is considering a good friend for the position of Big Cheese at her current institution.

In the midst of all of this, I went to a talk over lunch at which a colleague talked about his time growing up in Burma, his activism as part of a student rebel group, his near-death experiences, his time as a refugee, his incredible academic achievements in this country, and his current work to help craft a new constitution for his home country, all accomplished well before the age at which most people experience midlife crises. It’s humbling and awe-inspiring to sit and listen to a man who has lived a life like those that I read about in my history books. Such people, with their world-changing lives laid out in black and white, always seem somehow unreal, somehow not at all like your soft-spoken colleague who reads Goodnight Moon to his young daughters and plays airplane with them to get them to finish their food.

So yes, it has been quite a week. Tonight I hope to read more of the Odyssey, but that is my only goal. I need time to stare at my wall, decompress, and hope that tonight I’ll be able to sleep well and soundly for the first time in several days.