Out-of-body

Sometimes I feel like I’m barely in my own body.  Like I’m just going through the motions of life.  Maybe I just need a good vacation.  I seem to just walk around and do the things I’m supposed to, but I feel like a program is executing properly, and that I’m not really me.  It’s a really tough thing to describe.  But I sometimes feel like my mind is in a completely different spot than my body.  I had a student in my office and they were talking and I was helping since they seemed to be grateful at the end of the meeting, but I couldn’t remember afterwards what I even did.  Maybe some of the student stuff is starting to blend together.  This also happens in meetings where I feel out-of-body.  Maybe, for the parts of the job that I don’t enjoy as much as other parts, I feel out-of-body.  Though sometimes I feel this way in my outside life.  This is a new phenomena in my life, and I’m also finding myself not being as excited about my hobbies lately.  Maybe because the glimmer of the start of the new semester and nice cold weather is gone and the hum-drum of the middle of the semester is upon us.  A vacation could definitely reset things.

Some big grant deadlines passed recently.  I submitted these and I’m in a decent calm-after-the-storm phase.  I’m well-funded right now with two big industry ‘grants’, a large government grant, and a couple medium-sized grants, but I want to start a new big project based on some surprising prelim data.  This new project is definitely exciting, and I find myself able to actually focus and be ‘in-body’, but it’s still not quite there.  Jeez, I really wonder what’s going on.  Maybe after the surge of the start of the new semester and the rush to get the grants submitted my body doesn’t know what to do.

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