i need to recover the kind of intellectual energy i've always had. i keep going only because i think to myself i just need to get past the two years and then i'll be able to read and write and teach. school is draining, and classes frustrate. i am not functioning as well now not only because i'm depressed (probably precisely because of the fact i'm not functioning as well) but also because i'm not getting a sufficient amount of personal reading done. oh i do it with the children's books, of course, but of late that has become less of a pleasure and more of an escape route. and it is the only kind of reading i have time for, and haven't to work so hard at. what i need is the time and the energy to do the kind of reading i've always been able to - meditative essays and challenging novels, theory disguised as novels and poetry disguised as theory, studies and biographies and letters, the literary criticism of poets and the poetry criticism of literary scholars. the stories of brecht, padilla and barthelme, essays of spufford, weinberger and auerbach, books on metaphor, on allegory, on translation theory, on semiotics and thematic critcism and linguistic theory, on tales and narratives and riddles (oh the riddles! i haven't forgotten, but i've had to put it aside, and the slightest reminder excites me all over again - only there isn't time for both that and the daily grind) there's so much to read for class each week, more than one can manage, that one can't even read unassigned books relevant to class, much less time for paper research, and even less the fiction so necessary to thought and fluency. so then impossible the academic non-fiction pertaining to your own interests, and hardest the literary non-fiction. in this completely reversed hierarchy of reading what matters most is least possible, and i've always been able to teach myself by reading what i didn't have to, and to write the most explosive and challenging papers by mixing classwork with whatever i happened to be working on outside. and that isn't possible any longer.