Long Term Goals

I haven't blogged for a month and a half. It's not like there's been nothing to blog about, but none of it seemed really pertinent or news-worthy at the time. Things have happened in the real world. The mayor finally recanted on his awful plan that I had blogged about to change Parc Avenue to Boulevard Robert-Bourassa, and all it took for him to change his mind was a petition with 50,000+ signatures and mass protests in the streets in the middle of winter. Gilles Duceppe, le chef du Bloc Québécois, came to Canadian Instant Name Recognition U (to borrow Flavia's neat term), and the event, which was organized entirely by myself and two other guys, was, apparently, a huge success, although I was not even in town the day of to witness it. Reports in the undergrad newspapers were fair and balanced though, which is impressive given that one would expect them to have a hostile biasis towards "les méchants séparatistes" (or "séparatissses" as people are wont to say).

Work-wise though, there's been nothing to blog about because it feels like I've gotten nothing done since the beginning of term. In fact, I have done lots of work, but finished nothing on my to-do list. This appears to be the semester of long term goals (like being back in that diss-writing period) where everything is a marathon instead of a sprint. As a postdoc, I'm extremely lucky not to have to teach. Except for being a full, tenured prof on sabbatical (with a much higher salary than my own), I think that being a postdoc is the best job in all of academia. No classes, my time is entirely my own, and I'm managing to pump out articles left, right, and center (not ideologically speaking, of course!) and beef up my c.v. which is now up to four forthcoming articles (five if you count that one is being reprinted) and an article translation. If it weren't for the fact that I'm on the job market (and in a constant state of anxiety about my future and where I'll end up spending the rest of my life), and competing with lots of American and UK PhDs (which are inherently "better" on the Canadian market by virtue of not being Canadian--god forbid we hire someone with a PhD from our own country; they can't possibly measure up!), then life would be pretty damn sweet. As a result of this cushy job, work is getting done, albeit in little stages. I've been writing emails tracking down photos for the second of my articles to use illustrations (getting permissions is a total bitch and highly time-consuming--to be avoided at all costs if at all possible!). I've been writing emails getting permissions to use various unpublished manuscripts in my second book proposal, an anthology, which is also time-consuming but advancing slowly but surely. And I've been tracking down copies of successful book proposals from my friends as models to use when putting together my own book proposal coming out of the diss (if ever I get to the point of actually beginning to write said proposal). And now I'm doing the last set of final revisions (commas and such) on the article for which I just submitted revisions at New Year's with the hope that it will make it into this spring's issue of the journal if someone else is slack in getting their own article ready, otherwise it won't be out until next spring. All of this is good; all of this is progress; but for someone like me whose entire academic identity is formed around the idea of being fast, it doesn't feel like it. Given that most aspects of academia tend to advance at only a slightly faster pace than moss growing on a rock though, I guess I should get better acquainted with the concept of long term goals....