Beginning of Year Blues

I'm slightly drunk. I just came back from a wine & cheese lunch held in conjunction with the other department who was moved into our building this summer against our department's will and who appropriated the classroom and office space of many of my colleagues. I'm actually not very bitter because the move didn't affect me, and I work in both disciplines, but rarely talk to people in the other department, so it was nice for me to be able to meet many of them for the first time in my what is now my sixth year at this university.

I'm not half bombed because the wine & cheese was free and my grad student tendancies reemerged (although that is partly true too). No, it's because a very good friend of mine, who was like a father to me, died two days ago. I found out from my aunt back home yesterday evening. She was kind enought to wait until the evening to tell me so that she didn't spoil my day. Up until that point, it was a rather productive day, actually.

I've also got the blues because the MLA job list was posted on Friday and the jobs in my field this year suck. For the most part, they are in the middle-of-nowhere, podunk-ville, redneck state, USA. There are a few really good jobs in decent locations, but we all know that those will go to the Ivy League grads (INRU grads as Flavia calls them) , because there are no high-end schools on the list in my field this year. There are, however, a couple of schools in towns that have been struck by natural and not-so-natural disasters, so perhaps fewer people will apply there, or maybe everyone will reason like me and everyone will apply to those places. In any case, the outlook is grim. There is only one job in my country in my entire field this year. Can anyone say forced exile?

On the upside, I finished a 3-page "article" today and sent that off to the person who commissioned it. It's actually really hard to write a 3-page paper about anything. It's not long enough to say anything substantial, but it's too long to say nothing at all. It was based on a 39-page dissertation chapter I wrote many moons ago. I cheated and sent off 3 single-spaced pages instead of the (implicit) 3 double-spaced pages. Oh well. I can't even list it on my c.v., so why not?

Now, it's back to the relatively fun job of examining my first-ever set of page proofs! Yay! This isn't my first article, but it is the first one for which I've actually been sent back proofs and allowed to scrutinize them myself. It's exciting. I also need to begin to work soon on revising my book proposal, which Supervisor #3 deemed ok but in need of some revision. Rather than asking for more argument, which is what I expected, he thought it needed *less*! Yippie! Cutting is a lot easier than writing. What I need to add is more of the basic social history of the period I'm studying, which to me is "common knowledge" and easy to write, although it's far from being common knowledge to those who will read my prospectus and what will hopefully become my book.

I revised my right margin to-do list. It's pointless for me to make a semester-long to-do list. Mine needs to be for the whole academic school year. As I blogged about before, for a postdoc, it's all about long-term goals.