A nightmare too far

I dreamed I was getting ready to start a new graduate program to seek a Ph.D. in Psychology. At age 62. In Kentucky. While maintaining my day job teaching in Ohio. And in my dream the thing that worried me the most was not the stupidity of starting a new Ph.D. on the verge of retirement or the fact that Psychology would require me to do scary things with stats and spreadsheets--no, the burning question that turned this bizarre dream into a nightmare was What will I listen to on all those long drives?

Fortunately, I woke up from that nightmare, and the real-life nightmares I've been facing in my daily life are much less stressful. For instance:

I keep being required to feed people. Now I love feeding people if I'm doing the cooking; putting together a tried-and-true recipe in my own kitchen is one of my love languages. But I don't like being in charge of selecting food for a group of campus colleagues. I worry about making the wrong choices to suit every palate, and then I worry about submitting the invoice incorrectly so it doesn't get paid, and then I worry about forgetting to put the leftovers in the fridge. This happened once over the summer when a plate of chicken-salad sandwiches got overlooked and sat out overnight, and then I couldn't just throw them away in the nearest trash can because staff cuts have led to changes in the trash-emptying schedule so I had to go wandering around looking for a trash can that was likely to be emptied within the week or risk living with the smell of three-day-old chicken-salad sandwiches in my workspace. Nightmare.

For a morning person, a slate of back-to-back classes and meetings running from 1 to 6 p.m. on a Monday is another kind of nightmare, but at least I won't be expected to think too much at this afternoon's meetings. In one meeting: I'm assisting a colleague who is working remotely, so I have to get to the room early, pull up the Zoom link, connect with my colleague, and then stand by throughout the meeting to step in as needed: Bev, can you check and see if everyone is on the same page? Bev, can you troubleshoot that problem? Bev, can you let me know when everyone has finished that task? I can't lead the workshop myself because it deals with the kind of software that makes me break out in hives, but I am happy to help my colleague, who has helped me often in the past. But frankly, it would really be easier if she could insert a computer chip in my brain and then run me around the room like a remote-control robot.

Over the weekend I tackled the first major pile of grading for the semester, which included some student handwriting that nearly drove me demented--but the content of the essays was so delightful that it offset the nightmarish scrawls. Today I'll grade a pile of essays submitted online, which I couldn't do over the weekend because a nasty stye in my eye made staring at the small computer screen painful. The papers will be more readable on the big monitor in my office, but the eye still hurts. Not so much a nightmare as an annoyance, especially since nobody will mind if I put them off for a day or two.

Similarly my crowded schedule of meetings and tasks this week: It will be a challenge to get it all done, but it's doable as long as I keep up a steady pace, and if I have to let something slide, there will be no screaming involved. So I guess my daytime nightmares are pretty tame these days. I may experience some discomfort--but nobody's forcing me to drive a six-hour round trip twice a week with nothing good on the radio. That's a nightmare too far.