I'm going to be productive today . . .

but I must take a few minutes to sort of, um, blogularly express my heightened sense of, shall we say, expectation?

I don't do well with uncertainty.  I'm woman enough to admit it.  I know this about myself.  It tends to send me into emotional extremes.  One minute there's sunshine, and the next, there's nothing but clouds.  I know this about myself, and I'm not afraid to own up to it.  But I'll also say that, through the years, I've learned how to rein it in.  What I'm saying is that even though my brain is processing and reprocessing scads of unnecessary data at 1000 rpms, even though there are successive interchanges of sunshine and rain, I don't actually do anything that would show my hand.  In other words, I don't do anything impulsive that I would regret later.  Thank God.

Having said that, I think I'm also learning how to enjoy the uncertainty.  It's great when you can learn how to do that.  Because even though the fact of the matter is that there are many factors that are beyond your control, acknowledging that and deciding to take it a day at a time somehow increases your sense of agency.  And yes, I mean "agency" in the way that students of postcolonial literary theory mean it.

Sometimes things work out exactly the way you envisioned them, and sometimes they don't.  And sometimes, either one can result in dizzying, giddy satisfaction or crushing, disheartening disappointment.

One particular time that something happened exactly the way I had arranged it in my head was many years ago, when I was in Spain and I had a hopeless crush on a boy.  I had this mental scenario of us both going to a birthday party, both declaring that we weren't going to stay, and since we were both going to leave early, I envisioned him asking if I would like him to walk me home.  And as God is my witness, that was exactly what happened.

But one other time, quite recently, I applied for a teaching assistantship to go to Cuba.  I had it all worked out in my head.  But I didn't get it.  I was bummed.  But now, I'm still going.  Not as an assistant, but as an independent agent supported by a combination of research and travel grants.  In fact, I was recently awarded $1000 by one of them.  There's still another I'm applying for due later on this month.  In any event, I can say that I'm definitely going.  It definitely didn't work out the way I envisioned it, but this way is dizzyingly, giddily satisfying.

However this one is going to unravel is still a mystery.  But I know I'm in good Hands.