Solid?

The new solid-in-my-neurosis (as B. put it so well in comments to this post) feeling has somehow made me feel as though I can easily get through all of this grading, all of this prep (Why do I insist on including new material on syllabi during busy-with-conferences spring semesters? Just why??), and all of this writing. I am not panicked. I am feeling pretty fine.

I am not grading, prepping, or writing. Rather, I am looking online at villas for sale on the Amalfi coast (in the very modest 500,000 Euros-1.5 million Euros range), reading Neruda poems aloud (in Spanish, in a booming voice, to myself), and negotiating all of the various imaginary difficulties of the four love affairs I have imagined I will be involved in the next six months (with one student, one ex-boyfriend, and two different men who are twenty years my senior). I do not/will not/have never had the means to buy an Italian villa; my Spanish sucks; and any one of these love affairs would be nothing short of catastrophic. Clearly I have lost my mind.