It's been a summer of major changes in my life: completing grad school and moving on to my first job as a fellow at Arizona State University. As I adjust to a new position where I am "doing" almost as much as I am "thinking" (for a very word-based, university definition of doing), the impossible has occurred. I've begun to miss the abundant time I used to spend just sitting at the keyboard, writing. And think about writing. And fiddling.
I still do a fair amount of sitting and fiddling in the new job, of course, but my full agenda there does not include any special time for research. There is no gilt-edged appointment in my office Outlook calendar. I need to make that time myself, and I've begun to wish I was a faster writer. I mean, I'm fast enough at drafting proposals, emails and memos, but I don't have the prodigious speed that some academics seem to have for polishing off whole essays in an evening. I can barely read whole essays in an evening.
So my ambitions for this year are to practice the arts of making time and of thinking through problems on the go. It's dawned on me that my new slate of responsibilities is not a temporary condition, and that the period of graduate navel-gazing is done forever.
The positive side of this new reality is that I am actually starting to enjoy working on my own stuff once again. It's still a challenge of will to revise dissertation work for publication, but I am really starting to look forward to some new projects and fresh directions. Who knows, maybe I'll even put more time into this blog?
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