Sleep-walking weather

I was just sitting down to write a sternly worded e-mail to a student when the Internet decided to take a nap. (And why not? If you look up “nap weather” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of today, complete with gray skies and wind blowing wet trees sideways.) I don’t know whether this was a local technical glitch or something more widespread, but suddenly I found myself unable to say exactly what was on my mind at the moment.

This has been a dominant theme of my week: biting my tongue. 

• A colleague offers “helpful” “feedback” on a project I’ve been working on forever and I smile brightly and agree to make changes while an angry little voice inside my head screams If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, why don’t you do it yourself?   
• A student asks me to explain an important concept for the umpteenth time and I comply when I’d really like to say You didn’t take notes the first three times I explained it so why should I explain it again?   
• An acquaintance expresses ignorance of an important change in my life and I want to yell What have you been doing for the past year—sleep-walking?

Maybe we're all sleep-walking. This is, after all, sleep-walking weather. Maybe this Internet outage is a reminder that this might be a good time to sit back and take a chill pill. Maybe we should all put our heads down on our desks and close our eyes until sanity is restored to the universe—or until Internet service is restored, whichever comes first.

(Shhhh!!! You'll wake it up!)