my first post to my first blog. It’s a fine morning, this first full day of summer. No finer time to begin yet another academic blog.
So, the requisite little sumpthin about me: I just finished my first year on the tenure track, and boy howdy has it been a white-knuckle ride. Before I began this gig, I did two tours with the nation’s pusillanimous army of VAPs. (Where are you visiting from?, indeed.) Back then, I looked longingly at the tenure track, believing that securing a berth on it would end all my worries. Ha! Instead, I felt all year that the slightest infraction, like not greeting a dean with the proper enthusiasm, would end my career. My colleagues at my previous gigs seemed to like me. (Actually, that sentence should be in present tense, because they still keep in touch with me.) I got along with people because I didn’t care whether or not they liked me. Now I find myself smoothing senior feathers I’m never even sure I ruffled in the first place. If, say, a one-year VAP with the possibility of conversion to tenure track is like a year-long job interview, then the probationary period before tenure review is like a six-year-long interview. At least my first year on the tt was. Can I survive five more years of this?
No, I’m no fearless heroine. I’m not even Lucky Jim, nor was meant to be. My life is not that interesting, but I’ll be chronicling it, anyhow. See, I need to make substantial progress on my current book, because once the school year starts again I’d be delusional to think I can get any research done. My first book (I teach English, which is a “book field”) came out earlier this year, so there isn’t so much pressure to get the current one out, but I remain anxious about it. I’ll be using this space to record my progress on it, as well as my fitful, feeble efforts to carve out a life away from school in what to me remains a new city, where it’s summertime, and the living is—well, it just is.
In the next six weeks, I need to:
- finish my book proposal: this sucka is 12 pp, and I need to put it on a diet, but it lacks will power and refuses to exercise
- revise an old, well-received (though I say so myself) conference paper into a glorious, ground-breaking—nay, earth-shattering—article (hehe) for submission to Top Journal
- write a paper for an international conference that a colleague bullied me into. My department is hosting this conference, so I can’t afford to embarrass myself. Thank goodness one of the sessions concurrent with mine is populated by senior scholars who should pull away all the other attendees. Still, I can totally see my chair, whose work doesn’t intersect with the conference’s focus, and maybe a dean or two checking in to see whether I perform well enough to justify not canning me.
- make up my syllabi: both my preps are new, and if RMP is any indication, let’s just say that most of the little darlings have yet to join the Lucky Jane fanclub. On this topic, more to come. Oh yeah.
Today’s tasks include typing in edits to (i.e., deleting stuff from) my book proposal and finishing a novel that treats of queer and transnational themes, but which I find soporific. Well, what am I waiting for? Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high—like my anxieties and my pile of reading.
