I'm frantically trying to sweep the floor in the guest room (why? I don't know) but when I open the door, the doorknob comes off in my hand and flying ants start swarming out and crawling in a thick column up the wall, which stretches 20 or 30 feet overhead. I start tearing down long strips of wallpaper, which my waking brain would tell me is not the textbook way to deter flying ants, but this is all a horrible dream so I reach up, grab a bit of wallpaper, and pull, only to find behind it massive cracks in the plaster and holes in the wall. Every strip of wallpaper I pull down reveals more horrors, and meanwhile, the column of ants is getting thicker and angrier.
Maybe this nightmare is trying to tell me that I need to tackle some of those "deferred maintenance" projects at our house or that I need to clean up the post-Christmas mess at the parsonage in Jackson, but I'm convinced that the dream was spawned by the angry tantrums of the tiny Puritans who live in my brain. Holidays give them plenty of opportunities to make me feel guilty--that I'm overindulging in frivolity, that I really don't need to play another game of Bananagrams, that I'm not working hard enough to produce absolute holiday perfection--but who can attend to the loud indignant sermons of tiny internal Puritans when the house is full of giggling grandchildren?
But since the grandkids have gone, I've been doing what most enrages my tiny Puritans: loafing. Oh, I've accomplished a few things--done a little desultory course prep for next semester (which starts, EEK, in less than two weeks), kept up with correspondence for the anthology I'm editing, swept cookie crumbs and sprinkles off the floor, cooked a disappointing chunk of salmon--but I've also spent time just sitting around with my nose in a book totally unrelated to any academic project.
I got some good books for Christmas (and my birthday), and I've been recreationally reading Amit Majmudar's poetry collection Dothead (surprising, moving, marvelous), Rachel Denhollander's memoir What is a Girl Worth? (suspenseful even though I know how it ends), and Nathan W. Pyle's cartoon collection Strange Planet (nerdy, insightful, quietly but cumulatively funny). I even got caught up on my New Yorker magazines, but the tiny Puritans don't mind them so much because the articles can be considered educational.
My tiny Puritans want me always working but they're never satisfied with the results. Sure, I swept the floor, but did I dust the baseboards? Clean behind the oven? Wash the windows? (No, never, and not recently.) I can spend an entire morning updating a syllabus, but the tiny Puritans will keep nagging me to find a way to keep both Hemingway and James Baldwin instead of sacrificing one of them. And correspondence? Tiny Puritans want me to go back and proofread that e-mail message yet again even if it's only seven words long.
They're not happy with my work but they're even less happy when I take a break, but the advantage of loafing is this: there's really no one way to do it right, so the tiny Puritans can't complain that I'm doing it wrong. Tomorrow we're leaving on a quick trip to North Carolina to see family so today I need to pack, which I can't do until the laundry is done because everything I need is in there. So right now I intend to put up my feet and stick my face in a frivolous but fascinating book. I defy my tiny Puritans! (But I'll see them in my dreams.)
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