BALANCING ACT

Today Is Definitely the Day

With four courses to teach, two conference panels to run, and a visiting poet to entertain, something had to give

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By JANE HALADAY

I wake up before the alarm goes off and try to pull the covers over me for just a few more minutes of sleep. I encounter resistance to my tug and realize I'm not quite comfortable in my comforter, which is constricting me more than seems healthy, and I can't find the top sheet at all.

Then I remember that I haven't actually made the bed since doing laundry last weekend; it's Thursday. Instead, in exhaustion late Saturday night, I had simply folded my comforter in half and inserted myself into its plump softness like a blob of beans in a flour tortilla, and because I've been too tired lately to go the extra mile and make up the bed, it has remained that way ever since.

As that fact returns to me through fading grogginess this morning, I peer out from the folds of my burrito bed at the widespread evidence of my deteriorated living conditions and think with resolve, "Today will be the day."

The school year ended exactly one week ago. I should feel happier upon waking up this morning. And, make no mistake, I am happy to be done with my four-course-a-semester teaching load; done with responding to student e-mail messages ("Dr. Holliday i have a stomech flu and am throwing up bad so i cant come to class did we do anything today??"); done with my second-year self-evaluation, which always takes longer to prepare than I envision because of the necessary crafting of its long-winded, self-congratulatory narrative, plus copies of supporting documentation.

Still, while I'm technically now on vacation, I am loath to leave the cavern of my comforter to face the state of my home. Even more than usual, this school year screamed to its conclusion during the final month in a way that left me breathless and scrambling, and I was in survival mode for most of May.

Besides winding up my classes, May's activities included chairing panels at two regional conferences, entertaining a visiting poet who could only come during finals week, and presenting two student panels at community gatherings in the week before commencement.

Something had to give, and that something was the home front.

Not my mother's daughter when it comes to domestic neatness, I've never been a rigorous housekeeper. Still, before I became an assistant professor, I could at least pretend that I was able to maintain some kind of reasonable order in my physical environment. Now, as I finally step out of bed and negotiate my way to the bathroom through a minefield of folders, books, an extra pillow, yesterday's clothes in a heap, and — oh! that's where that other sandal is — an empty water bottle I keep meaning to move to the recycling bin, I have to stop kidding myself.

I've always enjoyed being single (mostly), yet lately I see the sense in having a partner. An academic needs somebody to go buy half-and-half for the coffee when you forgot to, someone to take out the trash when its emissions seem to border on unhealthful, and someone to wash the dishes because you're running late — again. (This time not because you were looking for that other sandal, but for your keys, which were actually plainly visible, but on the kitchen counter, where you weren't really expecting them since you usually hang them on a hook by the door.)

I suppose that largely practical and cynically unromantic view of the purpose of partnered life may shed light on why I remain single. On the other hand, I'm not sure I had that view until I became an assistant professor at a teaching institution.

But today, I am convinced, will be the day that I get my act together. Today I will actually make my bed, and I will put away the rest of the clean laundry that was so carefully folded last weekend but now sits slumped in a Slinkyesque pile on the couch, where it seemed to lean toward me and read over my shoulder when I sat down beside it last week to grade finals.

Now I can't even sit there anymore because next to the slumped laundry I have stacked an empty box from my most recent shipment of Peet's coffee from San Francisco. The junk mail that I shoved in a cardboard box will end up neatly recycled with the box once I find the wherewithal to transport both to my car and make the drive to the recycling center.

Right after I put away the laundry. Right after I do the past two days' dishes.

By god, just thinking about my day reminds me that I need a cup of strong coffee right now if any of this is going to happen at all. And it will: Today is definitely the day.

I'm not completely clear on what chaos theory is, or how it works, but I think my home is an excellent lab to prove the validity of that theory. From what I gather, chaos theory involves some sort of mathematically demonstrable breakdown of relational dynamics and matter, in which seemingly small events may lead to large-scale consequences within larger systems. That, I believe, pretty well describes what anyone coming into my house would see and smell at the moment.

There's something in chaos theory about fractals, too, and I definitely saw some of those advancing across the surface of the opaque and quivering organic matter that I excavated last night from a plastic container in my refrigerator, where it had germinated for the better part of spring semester.

And then there are the sort of salmony fractals in the grout between the tiles of my shower. Well, I'll get on those bad boys today, too, right after the laundry, the dishes, and the recycling.

How do people live this way? Or maybe the better question is, how do they not?

I am only completing year two in a tenure-track position, that slot coveted, at this time of year, by new Ph.D.'s who are either eagerly preparing to take on a new job, or are anxiously struggling to track one down.

Although I am fortunate in genuinely liking my university, my position, and my department, I still wonder on a regular basis why anyone wants a job that requires you to consistently choose between getting enough sleep and finishing an article on time; between taking the time to prepare something healthy to eat (and cleaning up afterward) and getting a stack of papers finished to return to students.

Of course I realize those could just be my own issues around efficient time management, or lack thereof, but balancing the tasks of daily living and self-maintenance with my professional obligations definitely seemed easier when I was a high-school teacher for eight years, and certainly when I was in graduate school and lecturing part time after that.

This full-time, tenure-track living takes a toll. Besides enacting domestic chaos theory, I also have to wonder about the trajectory of my professional development over the next 20 years or so. I teach literature and write about it, yet I certainly don't read many whole books anymore. Who has the time?

Introductions and indexes are my best friends these days, a fact of which I am not particularly proud.

Is it my age? Am I just slowing down? I'm not a spring chicken, but I'm not exactly over the hill yet, either. Still, one of my twentysomething colleagues, with whom I am collaborating on a new course, is married with an 18-month-old, owns a home much larger than the place I rent, and every time I go over there, there's not a thing out of place; it's like something in a magazine.

He and his wife seem always to be calmly watching an amusing TV show, or playing with the baby in the well-tended yard, and Ken will smile and tell me that he just finished a grant proposal and read a fantastic article about environmental justice that we should think about including in our course reader.

His book-project proposal is coming along very well, by the way, and he should be able to submit it next month. Would I like some homemade strawberry ice cream that they whipped up with the berries they went to pick earlier that morning?

Ken's life of placid productivity and domestic organization is all quite confusing to me — and highly annoying. I stay for the ice cream, complain about not having finished an abstract for a forthcoming conference, and take my leave so I can slink away and finish it.

But youth can't be the only factor in this equation. I have another colleague in California who is older than I am, in the process of an unpleasant divorce, has two children living with him, dates a woman with a child who lives 100 miles away, teaches classes at three different Southern California universities simultaneously, and publishes on a regular basis. How on earth does he that?

I don't think he cooks much, for one thing. In Los Angeles, you can pick up something good to eat — sushi, pad thai, falafel, pho — any night of the week. The same is not quite true in rural Southeastern North Carolina.

Where I currently reside, Restaurant Row consists of Bojangles, KFC, Waffle House, and Wendy's. Also, my Southern Californian colleague is a bit neurotic, so maybe all the energy of motion he generates is actually the glue that keeps him together. I think he might actually be alarmed to find himself too relaxed, with his calendar cleared. Maybe for him, to slow down is to fall apart?

In any event, once I find the toothpaste and brush my teeth, today's the day it's all going to change. The laundry, the dishes, the recycling; picking up those folders off the bedroom floor and filing them; then tackling the shower grout and maybe vacuuming the whole place while I'm at it.

But first, since I'm technically on summer vacation, I'm going to make my cup of Peet's coffee, sit down in the lone armchair that actually has nothing stacked on it, and finish that New Yorker article on global warming that I started reading in 2005. I know it's around here somewhere.

Jane Haladay is an assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.