It's a good tired

It's been an exhausting couple of weeks (I know, I know, it's only Thursday!) This new job is simultaneously invigorating and completely draining. It's great to meet so many other like-minded - and smart! - people, but meeting so many new people at one time can be mentally tiring.

I'm in a term teaching gig, which means I have only been offered work for the next ten months. While that kind of temporariness is no different than working as a sessional (or part-timer), the full-time aspect means that I am expected to perform all the job responsibilities that a tenure-track member of the faculty is expected to do. I will also be evaluated in the same manner, and should I get a job at a university that recognizes my work here, I could apply to have my year here count toward tenure elsewhere.

What that really means is that I am essentially starting an assistant professor job, without the title (or the job permanence).

Of course, since I'm on a short term, and would love to be on a longer term, I also feel the pressure to outperform the actual assistant professors hired in the department, because they are assured of work next year. I'm not. But that's another worry I don't need to think of right now.

I knew from others that the first year is hard. But I knew it in a cognitive way, not the way that my body now knows it. I've been feeling exhausted every day, even though my college activities have usually lasted less than a full 8-hour day. The combination of wanting to make a good impression, taking in a lot of information, making a lot of decisions (e.g. benefits to sign up for), and trying to finish off the writing I wanted to do this summer has meant that I've been sleeping 8-9 hours a night and still feeling not-quite rested.

I don't doubt that things will get easier as the semester and year progress, and I'm relatively confident that even next week, when the meetings trail off and the teaching ramps up I'll feel more like I'm in my element. But right now, I'm feeling old as I toddle off to bed at least an hour earlier than usual...!

New research in epidemiology

Taking zombies seriously.

To think about

In discussing teaching philosophy statements with new colleagues today, one talked about the importance of inspiring non-majors by getting them to understand and value literature for the things it allows us do. Getting students from other disciplines to see the value in looking at things from a different perspective is one of those powerful things that literature can do.

Although I know that, and I figure that English majors know that, I guess I hadn't really thought about how the classroom is an opportunity to get non-majors to see it in the same way. Not necessarily to convert them to English majors, but so that they can use that knowledge to their benefit in their own discipline.

Interesting food for thought.

Library Clues

You know you've been writing in graduate school for a long time when the library has changed the formatting of its homepage twice in the time you've been using it.

You know you're not finding that book when the four libraries (and consortia) you belong to do not carry the book.

The allure of research

One of the things I've learned about myself over the last several years is that I have a mistaken, but nonetheless healthy, conviction that if I just do enough research, my work will write itself. Even though I know it's a fallacy, there is a small part of me that really believes that with enough research, everything will just come together effortlessly and voila! the paper will be written.

I suppose it's not so much a belief as a fervent case of wishing it were so, but it's the reason for every act of writing procrastination that I've succumbed to over the last several years.

I do know that it's false, and so the procrastination never lasts for too long, but it's a potent procrastination force nonetheless. Even now, with a good conference paper that's been invited to be turned into a longer journal article, I find myself tempted to go to the databases, to find the perfect resource that when magically applied to my paper, will turn it into solid gold!

(I'm thinking in magical metaphors because the paper is about magic, though not really about alchemy... hey, wait... No! I must resist the desire to research alchemy as an angle for the paper...)

See what I mean?

Quote of the week

I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic -- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- Mark Twain, "The Disappearance of Literature" speech, 20 November 1900

Timeless space

Having spent the last two weeks on a few airplanes, I've come to realize that flying for more than about four hours has a very unreal quality about it, especially if you travel over more than four time zones.

You enter the aircraft, sit down, and patiently wait until allowed to leave again. You try to amuse yourself with movies, or books, or games, but you're in this strange place that has no real reference to the outside world. At 35,000 feet, the world is another place that you're no longer connected to.

And even though your body insists that it is the time that you just left, your mind knows that it must begin to abide by the rules of the time zone you'll be entering, which is sometimes a big enough gap to make you feel terribly confused. And tired. And when you're in the plane, you're not sure if you should be paying attention to your head, which says the time is what is coming up, or your body, that insists on the time that you are leaving.

It's a bit like suspended animation, only you're awake and usually bored.

Nirvana vs Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit up

This is both delightful and disturbing at the same time.