I love to get a chance to play—and sing it . . .

This has been bouncing around the inside of my head—the relatively uncluttered area I hear most people use to hold a functioning brain—like the lyrics of a song you hate for sometime now, and I'm hoping that by putting it into actual words it will do what most of my thoughts do when I try to formalize them into a coherent bit of writing, and evaporate into nothingness. When I worked I would often have this problem. For hours, or days and far too many nights, I would have a thought or image hovering in my consciousness just in front of the stuff I really needed or wanted to think about. Back then these interloping thoughts were usually snatches of conversations some secret part of me wished to have with either faculty—especially department chairs—or upper management or both.

Granted the current recurring thought has nothing to do with most faculties' lack of awareness of how modern business must, by necessity, operate or how books are actually printed and distributed. ("Yes, I imagine that book would be perfect for your class. But it is published by a small monastery in Tibet that only has contact with the outside one day a week and demands unblemished, black goats for payment. I can assure you we won't be able to have it here next week for the first day of class.") Nor does have to do with being given two completely contradictory, mutually inoperable directives within the space of two sentences. ("Um, let me get this right. You want me to hire three more people, and lower my payroll by 15%. Are you even aware of what you are saying?" "I didn't say it would be easy.")