Almost as soon as I posted the posting below, I began to feel a completely unexpected sensation: relief. As I tried to articulate for both Dr. C and Hambone yesterday, I'm not sure exactly whence it comes, but I feel better than I've felt in half a year.

I wrote my previous posting with my usual sardonic perspective, and fully expected to bear up under the added weight of the depressing realization that I work in a system.

As I sat in my boss's office Monday morning, though, I walked through my thinking on the subject with him, and in the course of conversation I discovered just how much of this company's operational direction and how many of the decisions of the previous three years seem to fit this model.

Instead of being enraged at managerial disingenuity, I found myself...well, feeling grounded again, or that I had finally gotten my bearings. I know why things happen here the way they do, even if -- and I think this is true -- very few others outside of executive management do. That doesn't excuse management from responsibility for not coming clean with us, of course. I attribute that to inept people managing, though, rather than the system itself.

So back to the point: three things seem to have occurred right around the same time as this shift in my perspective. What they fundamentally have to do with the positive change I can't yet determine with any measure of exactness, but here they are:

1. Brilliant training in Baltimore. It was, as I said elsewhere, perhaps the best training I've done these two or three years -- in the same class as some of the world-beater UNC sessions back in '03. It reminded me of my own strength and talent, and I demonstrated both to all present. It was a right fitting swan song.
   
   
2. Epiphany of career education company as engineered system, and as ongoing work of systems engineering. Suddenly, I do not feel that every disappointment is a personally marginalizing moment, that every choice to invest in new courses rather than faculty development is a statement of greed. It's that the company has chosen a certain tack. When it doesn't work out, they'll choose another. For some reason, I feel differentiated from my putative identity as the avatar of instructional quality, such that I can calmly observe such directional changes without blowing my top.
   
   
3. My performance review as confessional. My review was hardly surprising -- it was rather a statement and restatement in multiple ways of the obvious: that I've taken a lot of hits this year and am having trouble getting back on my feet. During one pivotal moment in the review conversation, I actually had the guts to say "I've never been so demoralized at any job I've ever had as I am here." To which my boss simply nodded his head and said, "I know."

Those are the pieces to which I can point as in some way formative of my present state of mind.

And what does that state of mind look like now? I woke up yesterday morning with my mind full of ideas, full of the prospect of accomplishing needful things, full of the sense that I could make them happen. In the past 24 hours I've done more planning and productive thinking about work projects than I did in the entire quarter previous.

I feel...present, again.