On cop shows it's become a cliche: the officers encounter a woman with bruises on her face and ask who's been hitting her and the woman says I walked into a door. Lame! Such a lame excuse that it has become code for Let's all pretend that no one is hitting me.
So I probably ought to come up with something else to say when people ask about the bruise on my forehead, like The plunger the aliens used to suck me into their flying saucer left a nasty red mark. That's about as believable as I walked into a door, but nevertheless I assure you that I' telling the truth: I walked into a door, and I have a door-shaped bruise to prove it.
Trust me: my husband is the last person on earth who would intentionally hurt anyone, and also he doesn't know his own strength, so if he decided one day to punch me in the face, I'd still be lying on the floor in the room where it happened. The laundry room. Which has swinging saloon doors, one of which failed to swing back out and so was located where I didn't expect it when I turn to walk vigorously out of the room.
My husband heard me holler and yelled up from the basement, Are you okay?
No, I said, but there's not a thing you can do about it.
I could blame it on my lifelong klutziness or an aging body or the malignant door, but the fact is that I've been doing a lot of stupid things lately because I'm distracted by fears that my teaching career is going pfft right in front of my face. Whatever I do to try not to think about it, I'm frequently assaulted by intrusive thoughts of despair over my moribund teaching career.
No literature classes this semester because students wouldn't sign up for them. No upper-level literature class since fall of 2024, and it's possible that one or both of my literature classes scheduled for next semester will be canceled due to low enrollment, which would leave me with...nothing to teach.
Of course the Powers That Be will make sure I devote my non-teaching time to administrative projects to make up for not teaching, but while I'm pretty good at administrative claptrap, it doesn't feed my soul the way teaching does. And it's a little embarrassing for the senior member of the English department to be haunting the halls with nothing to do because my courses have been so roundly rejected by students that I've become utterly irrelevant. (And they're left with no options for American Literature classes, which leads to a pretty unbalanced English major, but that's not my fault.)
I'm trying not to whine too much about this lest I become the curmudgeonly old crone who's always bringing down the mood, which will make me even less welcome on campus. But when a colleague from another department asked how I was doing this morning and I said not great and spilled my guts, I found out that it's not just me--other departments are seeing declining enrollments, and other colleagues are wondering what they'll do to fulfill contractual requirements when there's nothing left to teach. There's not enough administrative claptrap to fill all the gaps in teaching loads, so what are the options?
It's a painful time to be a prof, but at least the painful bruise on my forehead gives me a chance to change the subject. Twenty-five years ago I walked through a door into a wonderful career, and now that door has swung back to hit me in the face, and it hurts.
No, I'm not okay--but there's not a thing you can do about it.
