Today has been a good day.

Today, I:

• completed a narrative outline of my upcoming paper
• polished off one part of a headache-inducing committee assignment
• took a nice walk with a good friend
• found some good illustrations for my upcoming presentation
• got in a good bike ride
• stocked up on diet coke
  

Tonight, I will:

• go to a half-obligatory, half-convivial gathering and be recognized for a small non-work-related accomplishment
• begin sorting notecards according to the narrative outline
• roast and eat some veggies
  
• do some yoga (at home: sadly I missed the studio class again)

It's not a major day, but one filled with a number of small good things and no bad things. I'm gonna run with that.

A New, More Forgiving Way of Thinking about the Work I'm Doing

Athletes can push themselves very hard, but a good athlete also knows when she's pushed perhaps harder than she can take. She doesn't beat herself up for being sore the day after a grueling bit of exertion. Nor does she castigate herself for not being an olympic-class swimmer the first time out if she's spent the last ten years training as a pole-vaulter.

My brain is battered. In an ideal world, I could give myself recovery time, but deadlines suggest that there's going to be a bit more pushing before that happens, and I'm going to pay for it. I'm throwing new challenges at my little brain, and it may not be up to them all just yet.

BUT... I in no way need to blame myself for feeling worn-out. It is a natural consequence of over-exertion, and initial clumsiness is to be expected when exercising new mental muscles. I will likely stumble a bit in my upcoming presentation, but in the long run, it's going to be o-fc*king-kay.

A few (very few) words on the Bill Cronon sh*tstorm

By now, probably all of my readers have read about how leading environmental historian William Cronon has become the latest person to be winged by Wisconsin Republicans' attempts to radically shift the way things are done in that state. I'm not sure I can add much to the debate, so I'm just going to present a few bullet points and encourage y'all to really go read:

• You can find Bill Cronon's original post here. It's long, but I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. He lays out what happens, why it happened, and why he's resisting a FoIA request for his e-mails.
  
• Excellent analysis from more incisive historian minds than my own can be found at Historiann and Tenured Radical.
• UW Chancellor Biddy Martin's somewhat tepid response (at least to my outsider's eyes) can be found here. I hesitate to judge based on this, because we all know the mare's nest of debate that lurks behind all such cautiously worded statements [edit: my commenters are tending towards interpreting Chancellor Martin's words as cautious, but actually as firm a defender of Cronon as she can be in her current position, and I'm inclined to kinda sorta agree]. Whatever it means, it's an important document to read, and its importance will only increase over the coming weeks, so watch this space.
  
• For the record, I do believe that this is an attempt to harass an intellectual who is criticizing government. The state owns his computer, sure; but to me, this is tantamount to saying it also owns his brain and what comes out of it.
• Also for the record: this may be a good thing in some ways, in that it emphasizes the importance of tenure at a time when it is increasingly under attack -- in the same way that the last month of protests have shown how unions are relevant. Sometimes we need our rights and freedoms threatened to wake us up to why they need to be defended (or why they're obsolete and need to be scrapped and/or reformed, depending on your personal persuasion).
• On a personal note, I still believe in Wisconsin. They may have given us McCarthy, but they also gave us Fighting Bob La Follette.
  
• Finally, confidential to Wisconsin GOP: It's "Cronon" with an "o." Spelling counts.
  

I've been here before

Back my first semester in grad school, as a young M.A. student, the first paper I ever had to submit was one of two 20-pagers for a seminar with Big Deal Professor. I was new, I suspected that I was there on sufferance, and this was the professor who had drawn me to this school. So, I listened carefully to what he had to say in class, drew up a proposal for my first paper, got his approval, and began to read.

And I kept reading. And reading. For four weeks solid I read, because I was new both to the topic of my paper, and to the broader topic of the course in general. I knew nothing, and thought I had to know everything.

And four weeks into the reading phase (keep in mind that this was only the first of two major papers due that semester, about 7 weeks in), I figured out my first valuable grad school lesson: There will always be another book you should read. But you can't possibly, so at some point, you just need to arbitrarily call a halt to the reading, and start writing.

So I put away the books, and wrote, and revised, and bagged my first grad-school A.**

And now, here I am, fifteen years, two advanced degrees, one book, and a handful of articles later, with a presentation on new materials staring me in the face. Oddly enough, the paper version is going to have to be about -- you guessed it -- 20 pages long. And there are a stack of books and articles that I think I absolutely, positively must get read before I can start to write. And only just now did I remember 25 year-old me, and how she was brave enough to just stop reading, and start writing. So I'm giving myself until Sunday, and then, ready or not (and I'm probably more ready than I think I am), I write.


**This was before I figured out that anything less than an A-minus is a warning shot fired across a grad student bow. But it was a triumph at that moment, and that's how I will continue to treat it, thankyouverymuch.

Facile

I've written a grant proposal for my second book project. I've gotten a couple of people to put their eyes to it and give me some suggestions (thanks, Squadratomagico & T!). I have my first presentation on it in a couple of weeks.

And guess what? It feels facile. I have an idea that seems neat in the proposal, but I have no earthly clue if or how the result is going to say something really new. And that's terrifying.

Part of this, I know, is the result of being at the beginning of a project, barely into the new sources, both primary and secondary. Part of it is due to having just finished a project that managed to make a pretty original argument about a worked-over topic. So I keep plugging away at it, knowing that my real inspiration for the last project didn't come until I worked on it for several years.

I know these things. So why doesn't that knowledge make me feel any better?**

Fig. 1: the only member of my family who knows how to chill the hell out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** Oh, but you know what does make me feel better? As of today, I'm back on the bike!

The Incredible Shrinking Conference

Hey, Medievalists!

Did you get your Kalamazoo program today?

Did it seem... small?

I flipped to the back, and rather than the usual 700-odd (some very odd) panels, there were only 574. So I'm not imagining things.

We're not your typical conference.

What do we think? Off year? Trending downwards? Restricted travel budgets?

And the pearlescent pea-soup color for this year: love, or hate?

Today, in fake-achievement news:

from my e-mail this morning:

"I would like to be the first to offer you a well deserved congratulations. You are scheduled to be published in the 2012 Edition of the Academic Registry. Your contact information was acquired by our research staff, who pour over academic journals, conference lists, and published papers in an effort to find the most accomplished academics nationwide."

What, precisely, are they pouring over those journals? And won't the libraries be upset?