Hooray! Happy Dance!*

Spring Break in Professor House was a productive and successful one. I wore many hilarious and freaky outfits, wrote a conference paper, and got through more of the rest of my to dos than I thought I would. Wooo hooo hoooo!!



*I have to confess something. Lately, when I blast music and dance wildly around the garret, which happens quite regularly, I have been doing this thing . . . I dance badly on purpose, imitating famous bad dances such as the Elaine dance, the old man in the Six Flags commercial dance, the Finnish YMCA dance, and the spastic Charlie Brown kid dance. It is great fun, but I am concerned. There is a good possibility, I fear, that soon I will forget how to dance any other way and this will just be the way I dance. And that I will do it in public. (Click on the links when you have a minute. You will not be sorry.)

This week's wardrobe inspired by . . .

. . . a writing marathon. How to describe the get-ups one tends to wear during these intensive periods of writing? The process of of putting one of these outfits together springs from equal parts raw necessity, strange whim, and a tunnel vision focused entirely on pursuits of the mind. The results are strange but somehow empowering, inspiring great scholarly energy.

Early morning is my best time for generating ideas and writing quickly. It's best for me to get right to it. This is why my writing uniform for the day often begins with perhaps just a sweater thrown over a nightgown,



or a sweatshirt and p.j. bottom combo,



or sometimes just the full-on pajama.



Before I write, I often feel the need to put something on my head. My friend, Dr. Crazy, wrote almost her entire dissertation while wearing a tiara. I prefer a thinking cap of some kind. My two current favorites are these:



You don't have to tell me they are hideous. Most of my thinking caps I get for free. The hideousness, the freebieness--these are important aspects of a good thinking cap.

At some point I will have to take the dog outside, so I will add some lovely footwear to the ensemble.



I have not worn Uggs in public except to take the Chalupa into the backyard or to take the trash to the curb since 2003. I believe they are aesthetically atrocious. But, dudes, they are comfortable and warm.

Speaking of which, at some point I will, even in the winter, get too warm. You would think that I would just take off the wooly sheepskin footwear, but I do not. Instead, I will change into a tank top and one of the following:

a) gym shorts



or, b) this nonsensical item of clothing, the sweatskirt.



From that point in the day onward, it's all about quick fixes to a cold chest or shoulders or hands or legs. This is also when the dancer in me



takes over as a major sartorial influence.

Cold chest or shoulders? What could be better than the ballet sweater, or as a friend calls each of the no less than five or six I have in my wardrobe, the "tit cozy"?



Cold legs? Pants? Why?? Leg warmers are much more specific to this need!



Cold hands? May I suggest your standard fingerless glove,



or, for wrist and forearm warming needs, the opera-length fingerless glove. These may look suspiciously like sleeves to you and you might wonder, "Hey, why not just put on a shirt?". Because! You might at any moment need to remove those sleeves! Voila, removable sleeves!



Things might go anywhere from here depending on 1) the season; 2) the theoretical difficulty of the paper; 3) the page number-to-deadline ratio; and 4) caffeine, sugar, carb, and alcohol intake. Layers are sure to be removed and added, until by the end of any given writing-marathon day, one might see me walking La Chalupa looking something like this:



Laugh if you will, but that woman? That woman, if not a scholar, is most certainly a genius, and I can guarantee you she is thinking great thoughts.

Brautigan Saturday on Poetry Friday

The Sidney Greenstreet Blues

I think something beautiful
and amusing is gained
by remembering Sidney Greenstreet,
but it is a fragile thing.

The hand picks up a glass.
The eye looks at the glass
and then hand, glass, and eye
fall away.


Indeed.

One more class and then it's a much-needed week off for me. I refuse to call it "Spring Break" as that conjures up images of tropical settings and drunken debauchery or at the very least implies something related to Spring (which doesn't really come for me until May) or at the very very least denotes an actual break.

I have a lot of writing to do. A lot. This is not unusual for Spring Breaks March Writing Marathons of years past. There will be much writing but there will also be sleeping in and movies and wine and maybe just maybe a night or two out.

Do they still have the MTV Spring Break beach house or party house or whatever? If MTV were to do a Spring Break professor house, there would be a lone dishevelled woman in strange outfits (which I, like many of my comrades, tend to wear when I write), books and papers everywhere, a bored chihuahua, maybe something like The Maltese Falcon on the television, and several bottles of red wine in various states of fullness--one on the desk, one by the bedside, one by the table. Every once in a while in the MTV Spring Break Garret, the dishevelled prof would rouse herself from the laptop, put some Led Zeppelin or Violent Femmes on the iPod and dance wildly. Then it would be back to the writing.

OK, now I am kind of looking forward to my lame non-Spring Break alone with my own bad self.

Contradictory note to self

An elegant reading is not necessarily a good reading. Oh how I love an elegant reading.

Poetry Friday, Brautigan yet again

The Pumpkin Tide

I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea.

More Brautigan for Halloween! I think Brautigan month might be turning into Brautigan quarter or Brautigan Autumn or something.

It's a beautiful fall day here and I am feeling energetic. I have managed a feat of sheer genius by clearing a space in my teaching and meeting schedule to finish up two research projects that must must must be done by mid-November. My students will be enjoying a two-day Halloween break (to be worked into all of my future Fall schedules if and when I get tenure) and I will be busily churning this stuff out. Send me some good work vibes.

Tell me it's OK

So I have been telling myself that if I finish Big Major Tasks of the Day (and they are big, time-sucking tasks indeed), I can buy Ryan Adams Easy Tiger from iTunes. Problem is I would really really like to listen to it right now while finishing Big Major Tasks of the Day. I mean, it is 6 p.m. on a Saturday and I have been working steadily for hours and making great progress and I have waited nearly two months to buy this record. Does positive reinforcement work when you reinforce during preferred behavior rather than after?

Hmmm. . .I probably should have asked that before I started drinking this glass of Shiraz, huh?

"And I'm fractured . . .from a faaaall . . . and I wanna go hoooome."

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.

Blogging the lost

I don't know who came up with the phrase, "blogging the lost." I think it may have been Dr. Crazy who coined the term, though I know Profgrrrrl sometimes posts about a lost item in the hopes that the magic of the interwebs will bring it back.

Anyway. Motivation? Yoo hoo! Need to finish and send a proposal over here. Need to do the revisions on that article. Will need to do revisions on that other article when report comes back next week. Syllabi might also be useful to my students this semester so finishing those up can happen any time now. Could even conceivably get a few vacay days in before the semester begins if I got all of this done quickly.

Work mojo? TCB impulses? Need to take care of b'ness now. Helllooooooo?

Happyhappyhappyhappyhappy

I am done with the filthily stupidly theoretically dense paper and it really isn't that filthy or stupid at all. Needs some tweaky* but I am pretty happy with it, happy enough anyway to deliver it.

I am very close to getting out of here for a few days. This makes me ridiculously, deliriously happy.

Chalupa is going to be staying at her vacation home, the home of my friend Paloma and her dog, Milo. Milo, an Australian Ridgeback mix weighing in at about 125 lbs., is literally 15 times bigger than the Chalupa. She could not care less about him, even though he steals her toys and follows her around the yard, peeing immediately on any spot she has sniffed for more than two seconds. She is, however, insanely in love with "Kitty" (because that's what Paloma names all her cats), a Katrina rescue from New O.

I will try to blog from the road. Yay! The road!


*Okay, that's a typo but I like it, so it stays. What exactly is a "tweaky"? Whatever it is, I think we all might need a little.

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.

Day of beauty

Must get ghost photo off top of page, as it is now creeping me out.

So I have the research for the paper done and the paper mapped out in notes. It would make sense to write the thing today then, right?

Right. But instead I am going for a hair cut, highlights, mani-pedi, bra fitting/bra buying, and conference outfit shopping. I just found out it's likely to be 70 degrees in conference place during conference time, and this changes wardrobe plans SIGNIFICANTLY. I forget what 70-degree clothes I have in my closet, so the only logical plan is to buy new 70-degree clothes.

I am such a sensible girl.

Because I can't resist, here is a shot of Chalupa traversing the tundra in her favorite sweater and thinking longingly of the ancestral homeland.

Duh: a Cautionary Tale and an Apology

Before you spend three weeks purchasing and gathering materials for a conference presentation on kinda sorta brand new research and three days reading a bunch of crap out of the crap you have purchased and gathered--three days of the mere five you have to write the conference paper, you might want to take a look back at the abstract of said paper in the approved proposal. If you do, you might see that you are presenting a paper whose topic is almost completely unrelated to the research you are preparing to do. You might also see that the topic, while not as kinda sorta brand new as the imaginary topic you are about to spend money and time on, is even more abstract and difficult than the abstract and difficult crap you normally do. You might also wonder what your real proposed paper has to do with the topic of the panel (which you created) and the other papers on the panel (which you chose). You might also decide it's no wonder that you decided you were writing on the imaginary topic because the imaginary topic does actually have to do with the panel topic and the other papers, while the real topic. . .well, not so much. You might also realize you're fushizzled. Deeply deeply fushizzled.

I am going underground to write this impossible paper. If all you see here for the next few days is a series of Chalupa photos and/or the occasional one or two-word post (Fuck! Help! Dear God! The Humanity! Send Back-up! Fuck Fuck!), I hope you will understand. On that note, I leave you with "Chihuahua in the Sun."