Monday 4-15-19 Family in from out of town. My brother brought us a new used car to replace our old one which died unexpectedly. Had a great time with him and his family. Lots of little kid play, got a lot of work off my mind, not fully but to a greater a degree than usual. That was nice. AND SO TIRING. I think one of my lats is sore from carrying kids around. In the chair now. Feeling tired, lack of motivation, the usual. Four weeks of teaching left, then the wrap up work. It’s nuts that’s it’s only 4 weeks. I feel like I’m just getting to know the students. Used the morning poorly. Ugh. Sigh. In break between classes now. Going to do 5 minutes of work on my article. wed 4-17-19 cold or allergies or something today, past few days. ugh. Feeling tired, not enough hours in bed, plus gym yesterday. Felt good to be back after a few weeks. Gotta figure out how to go more often, totally worth the time. I worked yesterday on the edited volume piece, didn’t diary first. Gotta maintain the best practices so they’re in place when I need them to be in place. I will say I squandered the morning on Monday then had a very full day of teaching and meetings. I managed 5 minutes of writing time in the middle of the day and am proud of that. Would have been better still had I used the morning well. Long day today as well, am using the morning better though I came in late. Still better than Monday. Edited volume piece is intellectually exciting and the writing/revising feels interminable. I am gaining new and more fleshed out ideas, connections between different things that I hadn’t seen before, all of which is cool. I wish I could get it into shape to send off soon. We shall see. Going to work on that for a short interval now, 10-15 minutes. Over the course of the day I got the draft to a stopping point and sent it to some readers. I’m going to leave it for a week or so. Now to figure out what to do in the interim. Thought before bed: I can and should work on the doctors article again. I’m feeling pulled in multiple directions here - am I responsible for reading every single thing? What about all the stuff I know I read but no longer remember, am I responsible to reread? Clearly the answer has to be no. I think what I have is good and I should dig into the points I am trying to make of my own, and THEN read around further to buttress that via additional primary and secondary text, but I am also feeling like a fraud and feel like I thus need to read everything now, including stuff I read long ago and don’t remember. These feelings are hard. In terms of action steps, I should find my old notes and see where I can go from there.
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AlphaSmart files ported in 4-11-19
4-1-19 Monday April 1 on bus to work. I havent written in this way about my work in a while. At the immediate moment I am tired, in the sense of how much or rather little slieep I got last night and in the sense that I’ve been working a lot lately without enough break to recover - immediate and accumulated fatigue. I live a rich life in which I have developed a sophisticated palate for the types of tiredness. Some mind going blank and delayed processing time on the nose, a flavor of simmering frustration and exasperation with hints of silliness and impulsiveness, a lingering finish of doubt mixed with satisfaction at being a hard worker and hints of smugness. That joke could be better. We all could. Anyhow, on the bus thinking about work. Major events lately - meso level, so to speak, cyclical in the semester rather than career and life milestones - a large wave of grading due to a paper, two conferences presented at two weekends in a row (really feeling the lack of a weekend), grade reports, some admissions, some required meetings. Action packed. I’ve been trying to find times I can stay home to spend more tie w/ my family, flextime for the out of town and whatnot. That’s going okay, I think, though my time’s not really fungible in that missing a thing like dinner or bedtime stories isn’t really replaceble by being home in the late morning, and in that when I’m gone it changes the rhythm of family life and in a different way so does my being home at times I’m normally not. Oh well. One form of waged labor corrects the abuse of another and so on, as the Marx quip goes. I’ve gotten some nice appreciative emails from some students regarding my feedback on their papers. That’s gratifying. I work hard to give substantive comments and I want the students to feel I’ve spent the time with their work, so that the continue to spend the time doing it. Trying to get and keep them focused on the substance not the outcome. Good responses to my work at the conferences. I don’t need to impress people though I won’t deny it’s nice when I’ve felt I’ve done so. But I do want to come off as sincere in all the right ways and to get responses that take the work and intellectual values animating the work seriously. Engagement, is what I;m saying. I got that. That’s beter than impressing really because with engagement someone thinks wit you. Pleased to have had that happen at both events, relationships nurtured, and my own writing drive. Ah, thats a thing. My drive to write is relationsal in a various respects, might dig into that later, the various orientations to other people bound up with my own drive and values around being a writer. Some of the fun of the work is finding new thoughts and feeling proud of myself, should think about what other bits are fun; from there, when is the fun motivating and when is it a perk. I suspect that the dividing line between those twwo roles for fun will be organizd around relationality. I should get back to doing this diary regulaly, this feels nice. Book is still in the slow proofreading stage, I wantthat done, feeling impatient. Lots of ideas for articles and papers, some of them actual projects tied concretely to ohter people - ed. vol piece, etc, and ideas for future books. I’m trying to suspend the ‘I can’t write them all oh no’ response, which is a bit like mourning the imaginary kids I won’t have instead of focusing on my new baby. Further mental hygeine work needed. I am at the librray now and am going to get down to work. One other thing I want to capture, at the 1st conference I had good conversations about writing process with colleagues and this came up again at meeting here from more senior people and I am pleased to feel appreciated for the work and honesty I’ve had in saying I need this, and validated that I am onto something. Very grateful that En has partnered with me in this work, I’ve said that and should again. I find that work veyr valuable, more than individual attention in a spotlight I like being the promoter who sets up the venue and the practice space so ohters can be in the spotlight. I like performing too but they’re different. Within the appreciation and validation is also some potential for greater future relationship and community, against the threat of intellectual loneliness and for the positive taken on its own terms good time and satisfaction of that kind of relationship with others. So, some hope in there. Okay now to figure out my day and week. 4-2-19. I wrote a while today, shoulda diaried first as the riting didnt feel good. Not sure why. Stress from other things I think, leeching in, plus just writing is hard. I am tired out from travel and work. I can feel my attitude slipping a little recently. Have to shore it up, focus on gratitude. I wrote on what is hopefully an article about doctors, and wrote a good plan/to-do-list for that, and I wrote some notes for a new book project. SO SCARY. I think thats part of why I didn’t feel good about the writing. I find myself having what-if thoughts a lot lately, what if I’d had a different career, or a different kind of academic route in the past. I’m not dwelling on it, just noticing those thoughts. I think it’s that I’m impatient, it’s grass is green if only kind of thoughts. Need to refocus on my accomplishments in the life I actually have rather than focus on hypothetical accomplishments I miht have had in hypothetical other lives. I should start reading more about writing again, and this diary will be more necessary I think, for the sake of attitude and focus maintenance. I will feel better after more sleep too, harder to be positive when tired. Enough for now. Keep up the diary habit and keep up the writing as a result. 4/8/19 On bus. Tired. Don’t want to work today, and it’s an especially task-packed day. I;m in the effortful part of the term. It will be nice when it eases up. What’s on my mind writind-wise? Little. Some ideas fo the edited volume pice for Umut. I’ll work on that when I get to campus, after coffee. I think I’m going to make a priority of regrouping, planning, organizing these next few days. Small inputs of work to produce a product right now, and some of the remaining time spent creating organization, vision, and system to faciltiate greater productivity in the future. Part of tat plan should include going back to reading writing books and mental hygiene re: writing. MY self talk has improved around certin parts of teh work.I had a thought the other day about an arrea to work on but it escapes me just now, I think I wrote it in another day’s writing diary, I’ll have to check. I ‘m on the 2nd bus now. I may have a cold. Sigh. It will all work out in the end. Just keep going. So the plan is get to work, get coffee, start working on the doctors piece for 5-10 min then the ed. vol. piece for 5-10 min then shift to other obligations, looking over the week and planning accordingly. And prioritizing long term and organization over short term productivity. Nother thought: build habits of recognizing hard work, praise for the things I want to continue. I hesitate to link that accomplisment in terms of anything official because that’s basically weather (grateful for Stewart Lee’s remark on that). Another good habit would to spend more time on gratitude. With that in mind I’m proud of the time I’ve put in and the work I’ve done to make that time possible, the context construction, and the relationships. entries written in scrivener on computer 4-3-19 Wrote for a while tonite. Stayed up too late. Will regret that tomorrow. Feeling better having written. I had been feeling some tension and some anxiety about writing and also career-wise, various ambitions and so on plus some ‘grass is greener’ and some impostor syndrome. Writing made me feel better. I was writing about possible future projects. I’m nervous as to my ability to do those, and I’ve been feeding that nervousness via doubts about institutional support and my ability to do the research given existing support. I keep finding myself thinking about how my book is based on research I did in grad school and being like ‘can I get research done at this career stage?!’ but the reality is I had almost no money for the research I did in grad school so while I wish I had more research funds, I have at least as much as I did in grad school, and I’m a better researcher and writer now. So if I could do it then I can do it now. 4-4-19 I am feeling a bit drained. That’s fine. Comes with the territory, and comes and goes. Feeling a bit worried about deadlines and some career aspiration discomfort. What’s the Dillinger Four line? “My expectations always fail me.” I’m pleased that I’m diarying before writing. Alex read the new intro to my doctors article, said it’s good and he’s excited to read the rest. Me too! Gotta write it… I should find my writing books, put them all in one place, go back to slowly dipping in, keep up this diary again and maybe moved toward a kind of daily reflection as well. The self-talk work I did went well, probably more I could get out of that. Feeling okay enough, feeling like I’ll have a career within the bounds I’m hoping for. The rest work-wise is just details really. Going to free write a bit now. Free wrote a while on various new projects. About 600 words in about 20 minutes, very very rough prose. Suddenly beset by impostor syndrome - I can’t do it, I am not smart enough, and so on - and bad feelings regarding feasibility - I won’t get funds, other demands on my time will crowd this out, and so on. Hard stuff. Need to keep going. 4-5-19 Most of the day off paid work. A took the big girls to a performance and I stayed home with the baby. I took the car in to the shop this morning because it’s begun to smell faintly of gas. This afternoon the mechanic called me and said basically ‘buy a new car.’ That’s distressing. Also saw an ugly altercation between the mechanic and one of his employees when I picked up the car, felt I should do or say something, and didn’t. I dunno. All of that rattling around. A took all the girls to the library so I worked about 2 hours. Mostly writing. The doctors article is coming along. Not there yet but I am finding ideas I am excited to figure out. I’m learning something and developing my thoughts by working on it, which is satisfying. I didn’t write in the diary before writing today, I wanted to just jump right in. Fine for today but need to restore the habit so I have it for when I need it. All in all under the circumstances a pretty productive working day. It’s weird begin back in an early draft (though it’s quite far along as early drafts go, because it’s drawing on dissertation out-takes; probably be even worse when I’m REALLY back to square one in the future!). I think I’ve got a mental habit of judging my writing to think according to the standards of writing for presentation, and am blaming my first drafts for not being final drafts. I think I’m also worried I won’t figure it out and so on. I should go back to working on self talk. I have to get the Boice book back from Josh, and find my copy of the Jensen and reread the latter, especially pay close attention to the writing myths stuff. Anyhow, I showed up and did the work today, pleased about that, proud of myself. 4/9/19. Writing diary first that’s the plan. Stick to the plan. I did some email earlier because I was multi-tasking parenting and work before I left the house. Sigh. I can feel the difference that made, not for the better, mood-wise and in terms of reading the news and stuff before working. Stick to the plan, it’s really for my own good. And I can feel my writing-related mood has slipped some even from earlier this morning. So. This week’s going to be full of meetings and prep for meetings. In the remaining time I want to writing diary first thing, then write, keeping the writing short and sustainable. Maintain a routine I can sustain. Okay going to plug in and do the work. I may have written too long today but I am enjoying it. Unsure. Going to regroup and think about what I want to do. 4-10-19 Up late reading to the oldest kid, stayed up extra late to finish our book, then put her to bed and did a bit of writing. Middle kid woke up extra early this morning. I’m kind hurting from the tired. Oh well. Day full of teaching and student meetings. Small window of time this morning. Don’t want to use it. Want to sleeeeeep. Going to do 15min-ish of working on the article draft and anthology draft. Sort of in ‘what’s the point’ headspace but showing up is not optional. |