Wishing everyone a beautiful and prosperous new year

I made it to the MLA about 31 hours and many a Heineken after setting out for San Francisco. It was well worth it. I am back in the Deep Red for too many days before I reunite with The Someone at home and get to work on a new semester and a new year.

I have made a few resolutions. Last year's comical and purposely simple promise to do some "light stretching" worked out really well. It turned out to be more of a prophetic understatement than a resolution, as my life expanded in amazing and wonderful ways. This year I resolve to:

1. Say sweet things to self, rather than mean and nasty and self-defeating things
2. Become catlike in ability to get as much sleep as necessary (nap at will)
3. Develop ballerina-like posture--head up, shoulders back, chest forward (pirouette when and where appropriate)

So basically I will be a sweet-talking feline ballerina in 2009. I like it.

Some things I am thinking of doing that I might need ya'll to talk me out of

Completely unrelated and in no particular order:

1. Recycling, as in going out with someone I dated five years ago
2. Having a kid
3. Going back to eating whatever I want whenever I want, with the idea that I actually eat less and am thinner when I do so
4. Going back on Prozac
5. Learning to play the violin
6. Buying a video camera
7. Finishing my novel
8. Going to a monastery for a weekend
9. Smoking a cigarette (thinking of it but won't do it--check out the sidebar! 800 days tomorrow! 800 days, people!)

September

I have been in writing prison since early July. At some point I think I said I was going to do a long post about summer work strategies, with all the tips and tricks I have found useful as I work on the birthday "work better/faster/harder" resolution. Well, the post hasn't happened but the work has. I have basically been writing** on a 9-5, 10-6, or 11-7 schedule. I have had luck with the schedule, because it allows me to tell myself that it's ok to relax and to do no work at all in the evenings. I have also found it helpful to limit email and internet. For a while there, I was not accessing the internet for personal stuff (blogs, personal email) at all until 5 p.m. No personal email or internet during work hours became the better rule. This improved my focus. I realized two of my major problems with self-scheduling and working at home are focus and motivation. I am also working on improving focus through meditation and limited television, which is hard in the attic o' televisions but which truly helps. Finding motivation? It's hard. The tenure carrot is not enough and is more likely to invoke a paralyzing freak-out than a spurt of productivity. The promise of little rewards (glass of wine, dinner out, a movie) is more effective.

I have to say no one strategy works perfectly. Ultimately doing all that I have to do to do my job well and to get tenure is bloody difficult. It's too much. On paper, it doesn't seem possible. In reality, it somehow always is. In the end, it's about keeping your head down and plowing through the work. Some artful dodging, bobbing, and weaving as well as some rolling with the punches (usually in the form of extra work) when they come is required. Manipulating the space-time continuum proves, at times, necessary.

Dr. Crazy (whom you should go wish a very happy birthday) has an excellent post detailing the workload of an assistant professor on the tenure track, but even she cannot provide an exact account of all of the work that she does on a daily basis, especially during the school year. The post was prompted by the comments to an earlier post about protecting one's time--comments that in my opinion revealed all manner of misconceptions about the job. As a graduate student, you think you know. You do not. I did not, you do not, and you will not until you are in the thick of it. I do not mean to mystify what is neither mysterious nor extraordinary. Do any of us really know how we accomplish a challenging task? We lay our plans, we dedicate our time and our energy to carrying them out, we improvise when necessary, and at some point we are in the work and no longer thinking about it and just doing it. Do I know how I did what I did as a graduate student? No. I know it was exhausting and exhilarating and frustrating and rewarding and demoralizing and life-changing. Teaching in itself is a challenging job. Teaching on the tenure track is three (at least) challenging jobs rolled into one. How do we do it? We are able to do it because we are intelligent and clever and dedicated and talented and ambitious and hard-working and persistent and resilient. We are able to do it because we care--about our students, about our fields of study, about our profession. We are able to do it because we are kick-ass at what we do.*** Why do we have to apologize for it? Why do we have to explain that we are not spoiled entitled brats? I am not interested in being a martyr or a victim or a superhero. I have a challenging job. I do not do it perfectly but I do it very well. Period.

Now back to the (also totally necessary and perfectly valid) bitching component of my job. The last thing I want to do is tear through the pile of work that still must be done before the semester begins. That is, however, exactly what I have to do. Here's how I have decided to motivate myself. September! September is mine! I am promising myself that if I work furiously to get through all of this work in the next two weeks, I will take my summer vacation in September. How will I do this when school will be starting and in session? Well, I will be teaching and advising and getting started on the year's service work. I also have some minor revisions on one article due by the end of September. But but BUT! I can and will accomplish all of this during the weeks, and I will take every weekend (and maybe one or two long weekends) completely off in September.

I love autumn! Love love love! For all of the most cliched reasons. I am promising myself weekend trips to county fairs and to the off-season shore and to fields of antiques and maybe even to Favorite City. (I realize my September might spill into October. All the better!) I have more energy in the Fall than in any other season. I want to apply some of it to some seriously energized relaxation.

That's the plan and it's providing motivation for the moment. I may skimp on the blogging during the next two weeks or I may post spastically multiple times a day. It could go either way. If I disappear, do a little "Go Medusa Go!" chant for me. Hopefully my disappearance will mean that I am deep into the work. Or it may mean I have run off with the circus. Can you still do that? If so, it could go either way. Wish me luck!



**When I say writing, I mean the actual writing but also the various related tasks (including research, contacting people, etc.) of the several writing projects I am working on right now.
***And sometimes, even with all of this, because of chance and circumstance, we are not able to do "it," whether it is getting a job, getting published, or getting promoted.

Can I move to Mexico City?

It seems like an excellent, most desirable plan.

There I will reunite with Tomas, the first boyfriend of the (14-year-old) Medusa.

There I will bask in the sun and do . . .something both important and fun.

I will have window-boxes full of azaleas.

Can you tell I am in paper-writing hell?

Hate the filthily stupidly theoretically dense theses to which I am attracted.

Next year for this conference I am going to write about Robert Downey Jr. doing lines off of Jake Gyllenhaal's bare chest--apropos of nothing, suckers!!!!

In other news, it has been 601 days since I smoked a cigarette.

I might take up smoking again when I move to Mexico City.

I refuse to write a paragraph of more than one sentence for this post.

I would like to be drunk.

Or even just hungover.

THAT IS HOW BAD IT IS.

The chalupa, on the other hand, is quite content.

Random Bullets of I Feel Like Crap

I have sniffles and chills and aches. A cold, plain and simple. I got into bed at 7:30 p.m. last night and pretty much slept straight through to 9:30 a.m. this morning. I still feel crappy. I am too cranky and foggy to put the things bouncing around in my head into narrative form, so . . .

• I might be turning into my mother. My mother avoids all people with colds at all costs. She will also cancel plans if she is coming down with a cold or recovering from a cold, because she thinks it unforgivably rude to pass on known germs to others. I am especially cranky about this cold, because I got it from someone who knew he had a cold and made plans with me anyway and didn't tell me he was recovering from a particularly nasty cold until he had exposed me to all of his germy germs. Oh god! I am a seventy-year-old woman.
• But you see, I CAN'T HAVE A COLD RIGHT NOW! This is the week after my holiday but before school starts--the week in which I have to do everything I need to do in order to start the semester on a reasonably sane note. This is TCB week. Dammit!!!!!
• More evidence that I might be turning into my mother: I bought this. My mother has always refused to use a coffee maker. She has two old-fashioned percolators and makes a pot of decaf and a pot of regular every morning. Is it really worth the trouble? After two weeks of drinking the old-fashioned percolated coffee and then returning to my Mr. Coffee coffee, I have to say "blek, blek, blek" and "yes."
• At the risk of forever losing my film critic cred, what with yesterday's recommendation and with what I am about to say, that Night at the Museum really is a cute movie. My new favorite word is "weirdie."
  
• Is the "Megan Mullally Show" really still on the air? Have you seen this thing? It's unforgivably bad. The conversations I have on my couch with my non-celebrity friends are more interesting. Oh, I could turn to "The View," which airs at the same time. Ayyyyyyyyyyyy! Right, I'll say it again, "Hey Barbara, Rosie, Elizabeth, Joy--you're killing feminism!"
• I should be getting into the shower then getting into my study and then doing the things with the syllabi and the files and the organizing and the what-not. Don't wanna. Cold. Achey. Pajamas soft. Robe warm. Bed nice.
  
• I love The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. Isn't this passage beautiful? I have swum in Walden Pond at sundown more than once and once at night under a full moon. Transformative.
• Is it okay if I stay in bed today? If I do, I would only have a few days to get ready for my semester--writing syllabi (but I've taught these classes before), reviewing student work (but that does not have to be done right now, necessarily), re-organizing study, etc. Won't I just feel like a useless slug if I do stay in bed? Agh. Annoying even myself.
• Damn you, Man with Cold! You are bigger and stronger and younger than I am! Damn you for giving me your cold and going on your merry way!
• When I feel better, I want to blog about my New Year's Resolutions, which are serious this year. Briefly, they are: 1) Goof off more; 2) Indulge on regular basis creative impulses, including new one--sewing--made possible by snazzy new sewing machine I got as a Christmas gift; 3) spend time meditating, first of all and most importantly on the question of whether a) to go for tenure at Foggy C; b) to do a bigger job search next year; c) to do something totally different; or devious option d) to get tenure at Foggy C AND to put most of my energy into doing something totally different; 4) giant Spring cleaning, starting in Winter and lingering into Summer.
• OK, what if I moved into the living room, set up camp on the futon, did some work, watched some movies, but drank juice and tea and napped at will?
  
• I am seriously thinking of getting my hair cut, which is quite long, like this. But not until Spring. Thoughts?
  
• I think I might be the most boring person with a cold in the whole world.