For a weekend that held so much promise, this one has sure failed to deliver. Yesterday’s weird inability to wake up morphed into a crushing headache that seemed to grow stronger rather than weaker when I finally caved and popped some pills. Today I’m completely limp, shaky and off balance and generally blah. So rather than do anything responsible or important, I created a nest for myself on the couch and planned to have as boring a day as possible.

My plans were thwarted. I was idly in the middle reading my Expanded Diary (by which I mean a combination of tradition diary, blog posts, and correspondences with friends) from a year ago when there was a banging on my door.

That never happens. I live in an apartment building that seems to firmly believe that the best way to get along with neighbors is to deliberately ignore the fact that you have neighbors.

I had only barely disentangled myself from my couch nest when the banging was repeated.

The only other times I’ve heard that kind of knocking here were when my psychotic (and drunk) former building manager came to accuse me of deliberately flooding her apartment, and when my former neighbor (also drunk) thought I might have called the cops on her. I reminded myself that no heavy drinkers live here any more and that I generally get along with all my neighbors now, called “I’m coming,” and wobbled my way over to the door.

Here I was faced with a worried looking nurse and a completely naked, grinning 3-year-old girl. The nurse held a cell phone out as if it explained her presence entirely and asked if she could use my phone. I blinked at her. I blinked at her cell phone. I invited her in. How scary could a nurse with a naked 3-year-old be?

As she came in she explained that her daughter (my neighbor, and the mother of the toddler) was in a diabetic coma and that she needed to call an ambulance, which she proceeded to do, explaining to the 911 operator that she couldn’t stay on the line because she was on a neighbor’s phone because she couldn’t figure out how to make her daughter’s cell phone place a call.

There are just so many layers of helplessness here. There’s my neighbor, who has to deal with being a single mother of two toddlers who are too young to be able to check on her and call help when necessary. And my neighbor’s daughters, who stripped themselves naked and decided to draw a bath since their mom wasn’t drawing one for them (and ended up flooding not only their own bathroom but their downstairs neighbor’s as well). And my neighbor’s mother who couldn’t make a phone dial when she really needed it. And here I am, 15 feet away from the apartment, and I had no idea.

When she’s better, maybe I’ll see if she and her mother want me to be part of their system. I could surely go knock on her door if her mother can’t get her to answer the phone. I don’t want anything happening to her like what happened to my cousin last spring.

I’m also not superstitious, but wow… that apartment seems to be cursed. First there was out-of-control Party Girl. Then there was the guy that died of alcohol poisoning right there across the hall from me. And now this. In an apartment building that is otherwise blindingly boring, this begins to stand out as quite a pattern.

Each week, Friday tantalizes me with whispers of resolution and release. Each Friday begins with the only meeting I routinely look forward to and enjoy, followed by days that are generally quieter, calmer, and more settled than the other four days of the work week. Projects get finished. Email inboxes fill more slowly. Students rarely panic at me. It’s as if everyone and everything is hanging in suspension, just waiting for Saturday.

It’s nearly 8pm and I’ve been ready for bed for an hour. Or actually for 7 hours, but I couldn’t admit it to myself until an hour ago. Before I go to bed, though, I should eat dinner. But that would require getting up, and getting up doesn’t seem like a great idea, so maybe I’ll just wait for a while.

Of course, waiting isn’t likely to make me less worn out, and blood sugar is generally a useful thing to keep up. Still, no matter how much I explain that to myself, I can’t get my brain or my belly to acknowledge that they’re hungry, which reduces my motivation to get up. Which means that I haven’t eaten yet. Which means that I haven’t gone to bed yet.

I haven’t done anything else of use, either. I have a report I was going to work on tonight and a book that needs reading lest I fall behind in my book group. I have a bunch of blog reading to catch up on, too, but I haven’t done that either. No, instead I’ve been sitting here thinking about the fact that I can’t go to bed until I’ve eaten, but that I’m too tired to go eat.

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.

I caught myself talking about being sick in the past tense this week. For the first time nearly a year, I felt like my old self for days on end. For the first time in months and months, I made plans and did things without taking the inevitable crash into account and scheduling in prolonged fetal position time after every exertion.

Today I’m dragging a little again, but I’m holding onto the thought that this is just sleepiness brought on by living through an incredibly busy week. Please please please let it just be sleepiness. I’ve dared to hope that I’m getting better; I can’t go back now.