Moyshe kapoyer
Under the best of circumstances, I am not what you would call laid-back. No, I am wound more tightly than a cheerleader's high ponytail, a living ball of stress, filling the valuable nanoseconds with chatterthon as though one day to collect on a world-record in continuous drash, flipping unhappily through magazines and pursuing to the logical limit such questions as whether bees deserve to be enslaved rather than sitting still for the full instant it would take to find the source of my anxiety.

Not that I have any problem admitting that I am anxious. Everyone, including my landlord, my neighbors, the exterminator and waiting-room colleagues, knows this. Part of my anxiety is about keeping quiet, and probably dates from some kind of foundational lights-out=death moment c. 1985. As long as I am blathering on, I am in control. Bene dicio ergo bene sum, I am well-spoken therefore I am well, or better yet: I have a forceful opinion, therefore I exist.

The more anxious I feel, the more far-fetched opinions I take on, searching desperately for a disagreement-niche in which to encamp and play devil's advocate. It is this sort of nervous phatic argument that my whole family can enjoy. On the phone the other day with a very overtired constintina, somehow I ended up forcing her to admit that she would live in Chelsea if (counterfactual) she had a nice, affordable apartment there, after she had arged me out of TriBeCa, and Soho, and she finally was like, What the hell are we talking about?

Well, I'm anxious, I don't know what you're doing.

Perhaps this is the recessive salesperson gene, or maybe, as my analyst* pointed out to me, I missed my true calling.

What true calling? I ask, startled out of my rambling on about how once my mother furiously threatened to "revoke [my] poetic license".

She is silent, naturally.

I think. Liar? I say, knowing that's the wrong answer. And then: Babysitter? Lawyer?

She therapnotizes me, sphinxlike, willing me to come up with it myself.

Um, I'm pretty sure it was because I wanted attention? I say, feeling like a character in an after-school special.

She stares at me. Telling stories? she says, like she's talking to a three-year-old. Telling jokes? Talking? Amusing people?

I feel confused. Is that a job? Like a court jester?

She looks at me like I am completely insane.

I try again. An eldercare companion? Or more of a Friendster "activity partner"? Trophy wife? Camp counselor? I'm totally lost here.

She just gazes, mystically, as though I already know the answer, except I totally don't.

I don't know if she's talking about like in D&D I would be a bard? Or in the Ungame I would what?

I guess she's just trying to make me think. Like, wow, it's true. Since the age of like seven, I haven't seriously thought about a career in putting on plays in the living room, bossing others in complicated games that are more fun to invent than to play, or otherwise engaging in a life of spontaneous interventions, because I thought that would have to be like my hobby and I would have to have a job.

It's true that I do everything backwards, or at least in the most difficult way possible, because I am not quite down with my niche in the market economy and so I self-sabotage in every job, even those approaching something I'd actually like. My speciality is to demonstrate that only I can do certain things in a virtuosic feat of difficulty and then screw up things like cutting this piece of paper in half. Because I just don't do it, and it sits there, and I set something messy on top of it, and in the end it's like the worst job anyone has ever done in the history of the world, plus late. And no, I don't see what doing a mediocre job has to do with attaining things that are important to me, and I realize that my random rebelliousness is not the same thing as resistance, and this is still me talking here, and therapist is scoring an easy benjamin. So I could also get a little bit defensive and say that capitalism is like the Prime Mover of making everything go backwards, and that this is the most expensive of all possible worlds, and that she should grow like an onion, with her head in the ground, like the Stranger told Young Socrates in The Statesman!

She stopped me and said she was concerned that I couldn't separate "the personal from the political". Then she said my dream about Condoleeza Rice was really about her! Of course, I was stupidly like "No," and so that was $40 I'll never see again, arguing about it; however, unless she wants to suspend the consecutio temporum (in which case I totally get to tell her to grow backwards into a Baby) then the miracle of LJ can prove that I had that dream before I ever met her.

I am so relieved that I have managed to win against my therapist. I was really concerned for a moment there that I was getting better.

*I now am someone who has said "my analyst", also "my therapist", and also referred to a mysterious antecedentless "she" which clearly means my brain-doctor.

But the really important thing is that I got a job teaching college next semester, and I am xxxtremely stressed out about it. First of all, because it's in the Midwest. Second of all (which I just typed, Seconal) SECONAL, it's in the MIDWEST. I know from midwesterns. I went to college there. This is not some gratuitous disparagement of a region, it is my personal ANXIETY about certain experiences I had and certain needs I have now. I mean, [harp] I actually was discriminated against for being Jewish at the local Bank! Like, as in not allowed to open a bank account even though it was 1870? Am I 153? I realize that with good reason you are skeptical, and you think I'm being paranoid, but seriously it was totally insane and is a story for another time.

I figure this new college town is bound to be jewful, yet the Department Administrator (her title, dude) sends me an email on Erev Yom Kippur asking for my schedule preferences, and then another URGENT one reminding to send them in ASAP on Yom Kippur day! That stresses me out! Like what kind of place is this that I have to explain something that is on every bunny-covered and Christ-draped Gregorian calendar! I mean...isn't it? There aren't like alternacalendars for sale to those who like specifically don't wanna know about Canadian Boxers' Day or whatever? Nu? What am I procrastinating about? Oh, calendars. Some people do Pranayama, I do logorrhea. You say Messiah, I say Meshia. But we both say Yom KIHpur, and associate it with a form of pickled fish, because my grandparents are triplesecular. So?

Only third of all am I stressed because I've never taught literature before, and I have to design three courses right now, and because my thesis is due momentarily, and my advisor "Condie" is on her way here with a quitness.

P.S. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!