2008-06-21 - 9:34 a.m.

...if you have visions you should see a doctor...

It is the day after my first committee mtg for a big university committee at the Mountain, and I still feel about two inches tall. The goal of the committee was to design some new university programs. I went in with grand aspirations. I came out feeling like an idiot, wanting to cry.

I proposed something and no one seemed to understand what I was saying. I felt like that clueless grad student in a room full of senior people who were politely trying to humor the young enthusiast. I just was not on the same page as these people.

And then to top this off, I had to race out of the meeting to go off and pump in a stuffy, strange, sterile smelling bathroom at the uni, staying long after everyone else in the building (apart from the cleaning staff) had left.

It was enough to cut my confidence down to the core. When Susi woke me at 4am last night, I stayed awake for another hour, mobbed with re-enactments of the crime of my embarrassing performance. I tried all of the tricks to snap myself out of it. I thought of Susi. I thought of vacation. I thought of birds and silence and cool air. But the nasties just kept flowing back into my brain. What am I doing in this job? What made me think that I would be good at committee work? Why am I here, and perhaps I should just go off somewhere and do something else.

But what, and where.

When I was sixteen and a miserable teenager, the answer was always Italy - an abstract concept rather than an actual picture of a place to live. But maybe I need to live in my teenage Italy.....at least for awhile.