In the Founders Hall auditorium, Deja snagged a seat in the uppermost tier and did a small dance in her chair at that tiny victory before she came back to herself. She covered her outburst by preparing herself for the meeting, organizing her small slice of the long table. First, she made sure that her paper nameplate was clearly visible to the room behind her laptop — Deja Evans, Sociology — because if she had to be at this meeting, she needed to make sure it was recorded. Behind her nameplate, she placed the neat stack of issue ballots so she could snatch them when necessary. At one of her first meetings, she’d accidentally held up ballot collection digging in her bag for the slips of paper. Her body had practically overheated as the entire room had seemed to turn to glare at her with disdain. She never wanted to be that person again.

She pulled her laptop from her bag and placed it on the table next to her cellphone, both muted. She clutched her coffee cup in her left hand, opened her laptop, navigated to the university’s e-campus site, and then sighed at her grading options.

With just a few minutes before the meeting started, Deja knew she had to make this decision quickly, but she couldn’t fumble it, because if she chose wrong, she could deepen her boredom, burn with anger, sink into despair or be elated, all while trying to pretend to be paying attention to whatever was happening around her.

All university meetings were long, but the Faculty Senate meeting was so long that it felt like a waste to Deja unless she could check something off her to-do list. If she didn’t, she’d stumble out of the auditorium bleary-eyed and even more depressed about her lack of productivity. Like most of the faculty in the room, Deja felt like she was perpetually drowning beneath all the grading she had to complete by the deadlines she’d created, the students expected, and the university mandated. At the top of her list was a batch of essays for her “Race and Ethnicity” graduate course. She’d graded about half of those, and the prospect of whittling down that digital pile was attractive. She also had a stack of short quizzes for “Intro to World Cultures” and short essay responses for “Women, Gender and Societies.”

Deja chewed on her bottom lip and considered her options. If she were smart and interested in being kind to her future self, she would choose her graduate essays, but they required a lot of feedback, and she worried her constant typing would be a dead giveaway that she wasn’t paying even the slightest bit of attention. Granted, at least half of the room wouldn’t be paying attention either, but decorum required the pretense, so she chose the short essays with a smile. That was her favorite class of the semester anyway.

“Working hard or hardly working?”