A couple of colleagues won some Big Awards this past week. I'm just so pleased; we all started in our academic careers at about the same time and it's just so thrilling to watch folks I knew at the very start, way back when, now reach the heights of professional success. Of course back then I aspired to those same heights and now I realize I'll never reach them, but that's fine. I'm content to sit on the sidelines, to know what it takes, to cheer on the winners.
Right.
I do wish I were such a person, that kind of good and generous person who can rejoice heartily and wholly in another's success, even while contronting one's own failure. I aspire to be such a person. I pretend to be that person. I say the words, go through the motions, follow the script.
You know, actually, I think I put on an incredible performance most of the time. Damn. I should have gone into acting.
I'll keep saying the words, honing the performance, trying desperately to own the character, to become the role. Maybe, in time, the magic will happen. Transmutation, transmogrification, the spell that will change me, completely and utterly, to that better soul.
Right now, tho', I'm like Hermione crouching, horrified in the bathroom stall, faced with the fact that her plans have gone awry, that her preparations were insufficient, that she is not Millicent Bulstrode, but, sadly, grotesquely, Millicent's cat.
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