recaps and fresh starts

I have been neglecting this blog pretty terribly. This month has been a combination of busy and sick, which explains most of the neglect. Some kind of toddler plague has settled in my house. I've been in denial about being sick, for the most part, but nonetheless it has made fulfilling all of my responsibilities a challenge.

Not that I consider this blog a responsibility. Anyway.

To recap this month... The semester came to an end, in the usual blur of marking. It seemed like there were an unusually high number of students with personal crises (mostly real ones, I might add). I sometimes think that there should be a course in PhD programmes that prepares professors to be quasi-therapists. That would be very useful. Anyway, I don't teach again till July, which is a bit sad--I miss it when I'm gone--but also good as it's giving me time to re-think the course I'm teaching (which is the same one I just did this past semester) and to do a few other things. First on the "other things" docket are: 1) more paid work, which may or may not mean more hours of paid work, but will at least mean doing a better job with the non-teaching work I am being paid to do; and 2) writing. I have a chapter for an anthology that I'd really like to get more-or-less finished asap as it has a firm deadline in October, which is sooner than it sounds; and I want to get at least one journal article submitted by September. So I need to get cracking.

As an aside on this subject, I just got back from a 2-day conference at Duke, and feel even more fired up about publishing than I did before. I've got to get my work out there as more than a dissertation. I went through a crisis of confidence for a while in my last year of writing the diss.--induced, I think, mainly by spending far, far too much time staring at my research notes--where I started to wonder if anyone would ever care about anything I have to say. I now think that yes, they will. If I say it right. I've realized that I have to say what I have to say and be prepared for a lot of people to NOT like it; I have to go in knowing that will happen, that there will be resistance to the ideas I propose because at least some people will feel defensive or threatened. That's partly just the nature of academic publishing, but it's also partly specific to my topic and to the "rules" of what people are and are not supposed to say about it. So if I can get up the guts to spend a while hearing people say nasty things about me...

Being at the conference also reminded me of how much more networking I wish I'd done while I was living there. There are good reasons why I didn't do it. The main one is that by the time I reached the networking phase I was sick to the point where it interfered with my work. It's really that simple. And then we high-tailed it out of NC and came back to Canada to try to put ourselves back together again (there's that damned Humpty Dumpty allusion one more time). But good reason or no, I'm not as well connected as I'd like to be, largely because I didn't do the schmoozing required. (I'm also not a go-to-bars-and-have-drinks person, which means no entry into the old boys'/girls' club anyway; I don't hide the fact that I have children, which means a certain subset of people wouldn't want me there regardless; and the one that trumps it all since the glass ceiling is still VERY MUCH a reality, I'm not a boy, so there was a limit to how far I could get before I even started. I'm outside the circle of childfree women, a.k.a. The Serious Scholars Living the Life of the Mind, and the let's-be-buddies men, a.k.a. when you come drink with me I will connect you with jobs and opportunities. Awesome.) But I'm totally digressing because in the case of the department that sponsored the conference, it actually would have been more significant to just be present in their geographic space over the last few years, going to seminars and films and whatnot. (Which doesn't cancel out by bitching about sexism in History--that's still true. And, of course, having a new baby in the last few years would have made a lot of that impossible/extremely difficult, so cue back to the point about sexism, but make it systemic to all of academia/professional life rather than pinned to one discipline.) The period in the sentence here is that I just need to get myself out there NOW.

And, in fact, two weeks from now (13 days, actually) I go back to Duke again. It's not for research or presenting, though. I'm going with the whole family for convocation. I wasn't going to go (didn't go to my MA grad, as I was already in NC by then and didn't care enough to fly all the way back to Vancouver) but then I heard Oprah Winfrey is the speaker, so that was that. Not going to miss Oprah. She is someone who drives me crazy at the same time as she fascinates me--I'm guessing a lot of people feel that way about her. Anyway, so she's speaking at the football stadium in the big grad on the Sunday, and the day before is the hooding. I'm worried about boiling to death in cap and gown. I have to have something irrelevant on to which to project my stress. (I'm also worried that my advisor will forget/be suddenly unable to come and hood me--but that is actually a somewhat reasonable concern. My friend's advisor will be there to hood her, and in a pinch she could hood me, too, since we know each other well and we're from the same department; but there's an awkward history there that would make it kind of achingly, painfully ironic for me. Do not want.)

But this morning I'm sitting in my kitchen drinking tea, waiting for iTunes to finish converting my nearly-6000 song library to whatever format it converts things to. It has taken over 12 hours now and I suspect there are another 12 to go. It's sunny and less warm than I'd like it to be, but winter is over and I really feel, in many ways, like this week I get to start fresh.