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THINGS HAVE CHANGED:

Since I am no longer a professor in the classroom, this blog is changing focus. (I may at some future date change platforms, too, but not yet). I am now (as of May 2019) playing around with the idea of using this blog as a place to talk about the struggles of writing creatively. Those of you who have been following (or dipping in periodically) know that I've already been doing a little of that, but now the change is official. I don't write every day--yet--so I won't post to the blog every day--yet. But please do check in from time to time, if you're interested in this new phase in my life.


Hi! And you are...?

I am interested to see the fluctuation in my readers--but I don't know who is reading the blog, how you found it, and why you find it interesting. I'd love to hear from you! Please feel free to use the "comment" box at the end of any particular post to let me know what brought you to this page--and what keeps you coming back for more (if you do).





Monday, February 23, 2015

Workus interruptus

It's going to be a bumpy week, it seems, in terms of work time. Between doctors' appointments, social engagements (very important for one's sanity), class and a meeting of the Seminar Hours committee, my work time is going to get chopped up and/or truncated--all for excellent reasons, but still.

Today, for instance, I very nearly rescheduled my doctor's appointment, but then I thought, nah, I'll just go and get it over with. However, it was smack in the middle of the afternoon: nice, in that I didn't have to set an alarm (my measure of how difficult any day is going to be), but frustrating in that, by the time I got home, I'd sort of missed my "hour of power": the time of day when I tend to be most productive. I made myself sit (or stand) here and work for a while anyway, but as soon as the sun starts to go down, my entire system starts screaming "I'm done! I'm done! It's time to stop now!" I hate that I can't seem to push through to get just a little more work done, but my concentration just is shot.

I also didn't get quite as many hours of productive work time as I'd hoped for because I spent a good long while this morning drafting an e-mail in response to a "preference form" developed by another member of the Seminar Hours committee. The form itself was fine, but the content caused me some philosophical as well as pragmatic concerns. I imagine that the chair of the committee is getting fiercely annoyed by my continual backing up to get the underpinnings clear, but I truly, firmly believe that the pragmatic stuff will be easier to work out if we know why we're doing what we're doing.

(Side note: after writing that sentence, I thought I'd check my campus e-mail to see if I'd gotten any responses to my message. I had, a very helpful response, but I also got a tremendously snotty e-mail from a colleague asking why her scheduling requests were "ignored." I wanted to write back, "Because I hate you and I want you to suffer," but I didn't: I said I can't really reconstruct what happened at this point but that I'd been operating under an erroneous impression that we had to give faculty 4-day schedules even if they were teaching 2 online courses, which isn't the case--but she'd have been a "victim" of my error. I fell on my sword as graciously as possible because I don't want to get down in the muck with her, but I need a very large hankie to wipe off the snot.)

OK, bitching aside: I am glad that I got any work done today at all, and I should get a good run at it tomorrow. I really want to get the critical overview done, as in done, as in out of my hair, but the monster keeps growing. But tomorrow, I'm just going to sit down and chunk through the essays in order--and try to make myself write a little less about them. (I realize I'm going to have to significantly trim what I've already done, but that can come later. Right now, it's forward, forward, excelsior.)

And now, I'm going to excelsior my little self away from the dang-blanged computer and let my brain start  making white noise....

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