Dear poet,

We're having another manuscript competition. We hope you'll submit yours. Also, we hope you'll send us a check or money order or an open credit line. While you're at it, please tell every other poet you know about our competition. We hope the thought of all the other poets submitting doesn't make you want to slit your wrists, because we're kind of hoping you'll keep submitting your manuscript forever. You never know--this year, or the next, or the next, or the next, might be your year.

Don't be bitter, dear poet. You, your manuscript, and your open credit line are important to us! If you weren't around, there would be no reason for our existence! Chin up, dear poet. You are our raison d'etre.

In a side note, dear poet, we notice you haven't been writing much lately. Why is that? We realize we're veering away from our mission here, and that's a little risky, but we're a little worried about you. We know about those two word notes you make to yourself while you're in meetings, notes that you hope will turn into poems. But dear, dear poet: surely you can face the fact that if you don't at least spin those notes into sentences, they will be as dust. They will not become poems.

Well, dear poet, we hope you've noted the deadlines and the requirements for our manuscript competition. We hope--really hope--you'll start writing more. And we hope to see your manuscript soon. We're thinking about a secondary business, making bricks comprised of pressed manuscripts. We intend to sell them at an affordable price to community housing activists. We feel pretty good about this project. Think of it, dear poet! Think of how much good your manuscript will do in the world!

Sincerely yours,

The Press

Stressed out and its discontents.

There's a certain amount of madness that occurs in the long middle of any semester. In fact, you don't quite know it as a semester until that madness arrives--when you realize that you are, officially, behind, and you're probably going to be behind until it's over. Some semesters are worse than others; sometimes there are things beyond your personal control that make it that way, sometimes you just have less inner resources than other times, blah blah blah and then, the semester's over, and you can survey the ashes.

Is anyone else feeling bleak, though, about the entire enterprise? By "entire," you can take your pick: the global recession, the state of higher education, the specter of long-term unemployment that really takes the shine off optimism about anything, gridlock in the federal government, our truly horrifying state legislature, and on and on.

Who wants to read this? No one. I don't even want to write it.

Last week, I thought I was, perhaps, getting a handle on a particularly knotty problem at work, in my life as a faculty leader. That knotty problem is pretty substantial, involving budget cuts and the potential loss of jobs among the faculty. After a faculty meeting I conducted, wherein those present decided upon a course of action, a crash occurred. As in, I crashed. I crashed, emotionally, for a couple of days.

What it feels like is this: you feel like there's at least something you can do. It can still be daunting and scary. You can still feel, as it were, out there. Exposed, a little, but you feel like you can marshall your powers, be brave, get out there, exert yourself, execute a strategy, do something.

However: when you start to think that perhaps the action you've decided upon won't have the effect you've intended--that maybe it will lead to a worse outcome than just doing nothing--what is that? That makes you feel useless. And if you've marshaled your own powers--your research, your relationships, your rhetoric--to start taking action, and then you feel this shock of existential terror that this strategy might not be a good thing . . . you feel leached of direction, motive, faith in your own powers. Or anyone's powers, frankly.

By "you," I mean "me." Obviously.

You know what actually made me feel better? Not about the situation. I don't know what will make me feel better about that. No, the thing that made me feel connected to life again was buying food. Running son is off to Beijing this week, so we're having a little family/friends party tonight. Wandering the over-priced aisles of Whole Foods made me feel like a human being again. A person who can plan and execute the plan. A person who can make something good happen, like dinner. And conviviality.

We also saw my niece in her junior high musical production of Annie, which was shockingly well-produced and very enjoyable. May I say that my niece played a very talented Person of New York? and that the dog who played Sandy was very talented at sniffing out dog treats, and also alarmingly adorable? This play--there were a hundred kids, I bet, involved in it, and countless hours of planning and effort. I am not embarrassed to say that it lifted my spirits--the play itself, which was wonderful, but also just the thought of people working that hard to make something happen.

And off I'll go tomorrow, after we clean up the dishes and the leftovers tonight, to try to pull something together. Perhaps a more nuanced, multi-level strategy. More conversations and more behind-the-scenes negotiations. Something, maybe, that will make the situation better and not worse. Maybe I can still help.

I refuse to despair.

I used to say that, in a democracy, it was my duty to remain optimistic.

This maxim has been sorely tested of late. For one thing, I have to ask myself what a democracy is, if a court can overrule the will of the people. My Scotland daughter asked if perhaps we ought not to have independent observers of our next election. Duly noted.

However, I will not despair. I will not give up hope for this election, or in the hopeful possibilities represented by it. I will not believe that, because some white Democrats are reported to have some negative feelings about blacks, they will necessarily all base their electoral decision on those negative feelings. I will not believe it until they prove me wrong, and even then, I will say to them, History is not on your side.

Update: Check this out.