Slink off, or face the music?

Call this a lesson of midcareer. It could apply to any stage of my career, but it seems to have gotten worse, not better, as I advance and feel both flattered and obligated to say yes to the increasing number of invitations to do stuff.


Every semester, I try to start with a fairly clean e-mail inbox. For me, this means fewer than 100 messages in the active queue. But somehow, by a month in, I'm in over my head. And somewhere around week 6, I start setting the important stuff aside with the following thought:

"This is important. It demands my attention. But I'm being pulled in three directions at once, so I can't give it the attention it warrants. So I'll set it aside and answer it tonight. Or tomorrow. Or once I'm through this stack of exams."

And of course, by the time we get to tonight, or tomorrow, or when the stack of exams is finished, there have been 200-300 more e-mails, and 3 more urgent tasks, and the thing that demanded more attention than I could give it has gotten no attention at all. And I've completely forgotten about it.

That's right: the more important something is, the less likely it is ever to get answered.

And then, the end of semester comes, and I start to dig my way out. And I discover these things, and I realize that the person on the other end has no idea what has been going on this semester; they only know that I appear to have rudely blown them off. And then I have to decide whether to slink off or face up to them and ask whether they still are interested, even though it's 6-10 weeks later.

I've done this three times in the past week. Here are the results:

1. The person in question contacted me after I'd decided that the best thing to do was assume they'd given up on me, and hope that they forget all about me so the word doesn't get around. They asked if I was still interested for submitting an abstract. And my answer was an enthusiastic YES! and an abstract that I submitted within 48 hours lest I lose track of it again. All is, apparently, well.

2. Emboldened by the forgiveness of one set of people, I reached out to another who had patiently e-mailed me twice with no response. I did this as I was getting to the bottom of my inbox: Profuse apologies; It sounds like an interesting project, but I couldn't do it on the specified deadline. Would they be interested in later? Response came right back: No thanks, and not happy with me.  gulp.

3. And then I found one even more buried, where I had actually begun a correspondence, then the whole thing had lapsed... on March 1.  Jesus. I'm a hot mess. I just tried the approach I tried with #2: profuse apologies, yes I'm interested, yes I could make the deadline, here's what I'd do.

We'll see how this goes.

The Grand Experiment

I'm unplugging.

No, not from the blog (though it might seem that way most of the time lately). What I'm doing -- brace yourself -- is disconnecting my home internet.

The spur for this decision was financial, as my home internet bill recently rocketed up to sixty-three dollars a month. That's just the internet. I knew that if I called the local monopoly and tried to cancel, they'd lower my rates. But then the more I started thinking about it, the more I wondered what my life would be like without internet at home.

Here's the thing: Having home internet allows me to do things like look up stuff immediately, download and upload student papers, order library books, maintain my course website, answer e-mails from my students and other assorted university folk -- all without having to go into the office. I can do it any day of the week, any time, day or night. That's a good thing.

Except when it's not, right? Being available 24/7 is a decidedly mixed blessing.

And then there's all the stuff that's just a drain: too much time on the web, watching TV shows I don't care about, watching videos of nothing important, checking Facebook gods only know how many times a day. Yes, I tried the thing where you install limits on the biggest time-suck sites. Except that I now just go in and dismantle these things. I have no self-control. And I figure I spent 15 hours a week, at least, doing things that don't matter, and that I can't remember 15 minutes later.

In short, for me, home internet provides marginal convenience at considerable expense, in many senses of the word. Hence, the grand experiment in unplugging. Yes, I'll still have internet at the office (I'm there four days a week), not to mention at various coffee shops that I frequent a couple times a week, as well as via my phone. It's not like I'll be out of touch. But what I won't be able to do is come home from work, turn on the computer, and piss away hours every evening. I'm interested to see what happens. What will my brain do without the constant distraction? What could I do with 15 more hours a week?

I'll be sure to use some of that extra time to keep you updated. From a coffee shop, that is.

Meta-Project, Phase Two: Health

So, after having taken two months to get phase one ("Prepare the Foundation") about 85% finished, it's on to phase two of the meta-project. The theme for this month is "health."

It's way too easy for academics to sacrifice their health. There's always something to do. In very little time, we stop getting exercise, stop cooking, stop doing anything but working. And when work falls apart, it all falls apart, because that's all we've been doing.

I've decided that, for me, it's time to knock it the hell off. I decided that provisionally a while ago, but it really hit home the other day when I was looking at a stack of reading and grading, and thought, "Well, dammit. I'm going to have to skip yoga[1] again -- that'll make it a week and a half now." And suddenly, it hit me: I was making a conscious decision to sacrifice my physical well-being for my job. Worse, I was doing it without thinking, because that had become the natural choice for me.

So, this is the theme for the month of March: I work on making conscious choice for health, in all its forms. Some ideas...

For physical health, I've recommitted to at least three yoga practices a week (I could substitute any serious exercise here, but yoga is the one I like personally). I'm also aware that I eat (and drink) a lot of garbage. Part of this is just making bad choices, so I want to think seriously about how much salt, diet soda, and caffeine I am consuming. Can I make healthier choices, at least 50% of the time? But the other part of the food thing is that I neglect to keep the fridge stocked with healthy things. So, I know what to do there, too.

For mental/spiritual health, I've started daily meditation, first thing in the morning. I'm already several days into it,[2] and I already feel calmer. It's hard to sit there, doing nothing -- not even making a mental to-do list! -- for 15-20 minutes every morning. But when I do, I find that the day goes more smoothly. And I no longer want to throttle people who present me with minor irritations.

Finally, financial health. Annddd.... here's the big news that I promised you in the previous post. Three weeks ago, I paid off my last credit card. Consumer debt had been claiming roughly one-third of my take-home pay for the past 9 years. Finally, it's done. So my financial health goals: start saving. For a house, for retirement, for those occasional extra expenses.

That's the intention for March. I think it's doable.


[1] The fact that it was yoga in particular doesn't matter so much as the fact that it was "that thing that is simultaneously really good for me and that I actually like to do." For you, it may be running, or swimming, or fencing, or whatever. The point is, when I realized that I was actively collaborating in staying away from something that was doing double-duty in making me well, I thought, "well, that's just the last fucking straw, isn't it?"

[2] Though I missed it this morning because there was a glitch with my download... I know: lame excuse.

From the "Bad Professor" Files

Over a week after receiving them, I determined that today would be the day that I sat down with the first papers from one of my classes. Kind of has to be, because Tuesday I'm getting a batch from another class, and I want to be out from under one stack for at least a couple hours before getting buried under the next one. So I got up early, went to the farmers' market, and then went home intending to put away the groceries and grab the stack of papers.

Except that they weren't on the table.

Ah, of course not. Because I was cleaning stuff this weekend. So they must be over here...

Nope. Not there either.

Well, how about the two other places that they could possibly be in my tiny apartment. No, and... no.

There is no other place in my apartment they could be. They are definitively Not Here. But neither do I remember taking them Elsewhere. It's just a largish, binder-clipped stack of papers that has somehow mysteriously vanished.

This would worry the crap out of me, except that I have made a conscious decision to tell myself that I took them up to the office for no good reason. Or maybe I'm confusing this binder-clipped stack of papers with one for a different class that I did bring home, grade, and take back to the office, and the ones for this class never made it home in the first place. Either way, I tell myself, I will see them sitting on my desk when I go up Monday. Right?

::sigh:: I am supposed to be cultivating attentiveness. Instead, I usually feel like this:

I have been a killer for as long as I can remember.

I am in the process of killing three houseplants. One was a gift from a friend, a cutting from a houseplant of his that I liked very much. Another was a sacred trust, a colleague's gift from her best friend in grad school that she asked me to care for it while she was away this summer. The third is zombie plant, something that should have already died a thousand deaths from under-watering since I bought it my first year in grad school, but somehow always clawed its way back from the brink, until now.

I told my friend's husband that I was capable of killing cactus; had, in fact killed a cactus. And also an ivy. He was incredulous, and grew even more so when I explained that these two botanical deaths had taken place within a month of each other.

These are not, I should note, delicate tropical plants. They are simple houseplants. They need water and sunlight. Occasionally they should be repotted, probably. They are not fiddly creatures, yet they die under my care. And today, as I contemplated another mortally ill houseplant, I wondered why. Plants, after all, do not hate anyone personally. They do not hold grudges. And they do not require a particular personality trait to be happy. Their needs are simple: healthy soil, sunlight, and water. Requirements may vary slightly from one plant to the next, but I'll bet there are books. And I'll bet it's not rocket science.

On the other hand, today I was thinking that plants -- even the most forgiving ones -- do require something that I appear to have trouble with: attention. I may be seeing signs and portents where none exist, but: I think my sickly houseplants may be telling me something. And I have this funny idea that if I can bring them back to life, I will learn something in the process.