Let's not get crazy here. I have not fallen in a pit of despair.

It's been noised about in certain quarters that I may have advertised certain things about myself and my mental state in this space that were misleading. See below.

Contrary to what I may have misindicated, I have not fallen into a pit of despair. Work is going fine, though it's not easy. I'm eating approximately 3 meals a day and drinking about 1.25 coffees a day. I talk with my special lady friend 6.7 mornings per week. I leave the house 6.9 days a week for an average trip of 7.25 hours at a time. I will return to California in the new year with a satchel full of new documents and information with which to work.

I have to say, though, that I've thought about falling into a pit of despair.
The fact of the matter is, work is occasionally frustrating or depressing. That is a universal fact of archival research. Ask anyone who's done it. Moreover and more importantly, despite having lived here for 2 months in the spring, I still feel like a square peg looking for a round hole much of the time. It's hard to put down exactly what it's like, but the best I can do is to say that the cultural referents and mental signposts that I've built up to make life easy and smooth to this point no longer help me to make life easy and smooth. As a result, everything here is more difficult than it would be at home.

Yes, it's a grand adventure. Or something. But I'm not here to have grand adventures, I'm here to work. I don't really mind the fact that shopping at stores is harder or that finding people to talk to is harder. But it's unnerving and stressful to feel like the language barrier (which still exists) and cultural differences might prevent me from successfully maximizing the time I have here, work wise. I'm trying to talk around something here without saying exactly what it is because it involves being allowed to bend the rules of the archive and I don't want it anywhere written out so I can plausibly deny having done any rule-bending. Also, I don't want it to get back to the people there that I've been advertising (which I am not) that they are letting me bend rules (which they're not) because then they might put a stop to it. It, here, meaning the thing that I'm not really doing (wink wink). So I probably shouldn't have said anything at all.

[3.5 paragraphs excised because they missed the point I was trying to get at.]

THE TAKE HOME POINT, OR, IN CONCLUSION,
I'm not trying to say that life is hard and boo hoo I feel sad about this and I am really down. I am not complaining that things are difficult and it makes me feel bad, even if that is what it sounds like. No.

What I am feeling is more like a combination of (a) stress and (b) cultural disorientation. Without a stable set of familiar external referents I have a difficult time locating a corresponding set of stable internal referents, which is to say that I feel like I don't even know how I feel or like I don't know how to feel or what to feel a lot of the time here.

The major blind-spot in this analysis, of course, is the very real fact of continued contact with home while I'm here. Does this undermine or only complicate my claim that I'm currently inhabiting an internal/external space where I can't read the signposts? Unclear. More on this as I think about it, but I have to get to work now.