Living yourself out of a corner

While I’m on the short, reflective posts: everyone (especially those who have ever actually painted a floor) is familiar with the concept of painting yourself into a corner. Once you’ve done it, you work out how to paint yourself out of a corner, all the way to the point where you close the door and put a sign on the outside saying something about wet paint.

I have never had to live with a long-term, very long distance academic commute before. My home, dog, children, and wife are all over 8,000 kilometres away (Siri, how far is it between Chittagong, Bangladesh and Aberdeen, Scotland?). That translates to a full day or more of travel. I haven’t seen them for 114 days or so. I am going home tomorrow. It’s only a bit over three weeks, but -2° and pitch black at 3:00 doesn’t sound so bad.

So for the past few days I have been running down the food supplies, making sure the plants that need potting up are potted, telling my students very clearly that if they want me to read a rough draft they need to get it to me, well, yesterday. I’ve been buying presents. It’s the running down the food supplies that’s key, though—refusing to buy any fresh fruit, making sure I can drink all the milk. Lunch was three rather old oranges and a slice of toast; dinner was the smaller, remaining bit of a bag of pasta, the chili oil left in the karai, and some geriatric green beans. I had told myself I would get take-away this evening, but after three months of teaching environmental ethics I just couldn’t. There’s a story about Shunryu Suzuki Roshi chasing a discarded cabbage leaf down a stream that always comes to mind when I confront mostly edible veg refugees in the fridge, and I think about the take-away and usually wind up finding some way of rescuing the refugee vegetables and eating them.

By tomorrow morning, when I eat my last bit of toast, I will have lived myself out of this corner. When I return to teach in January I will have to rush to the shops on the first day and get a few things, but I have not thrown away anything I could eat, and there will be no moulding monsters when I return. How many other professors live with this particular species of precarity, this cold videochat connection to their children and their partner, this barely controlled hope at the thought of (just for a bit) going home?