My plan for the day originally did not involve posting. I can’t say for sure what it might have otherwise involved, but circa 6 o’clock posting was not on the docket. Right now, however, following a mid-morning fire alarm that sent me scurrying home, I find myself more disoriented than usual. And that, I think, is saying something.
I have a half-cooked edition of Sex and the Single Professor in the hopper, and I also feel a reply to this job market thread is warranted (I’ve pilfered that link from The Unknown Adjunct, by the bye; for his take, head hither). Right now, however, my mind is in a not-entirely-unwelcome fugue state, the kind that arrives of an Easter weekend when one has many things to do and more motives than momentum.
I’ve been preoccupied with untimely desires for the past week or so, a perhaps unavoidable corollary of the pudding problem. I’ve been reshuffling my finances as well, sliding money around in anticipation of a home purchase this time next year. I’ve got happyjoyluck prospects in the offing, too: one of my homefolk will be in Kalamazoo for a conference at the beginning of May, and I’ll get to have dinner with some of Central’s shiny Sigma Tau Deltafolk next Friday. I’ve been scripting Plan A (which involves the verse collection), Plan B (which involves three eighteenth-century articles), and Plan C (which involves a shovel and a bag of quicklime) for the summer, which promises to be the most leisurely or most frantic season in recent Wandlessian memory. I’ve got a diet regimen and exercise plan to put together for the summer months as well, and while I’m at it I probably ought to assemble my tenure and reappointment application materials. I’m already thinking about committee assignments for 2009-10, not to mention an Honors course proposal for next spring. Plus I want pizza. Right now. I really, really want pizza.
The upshot, of course, is that I also really, really want to write. Right now.
Is my writing the product of irresponsibility, maybe even perversity? Probably. But it also has a lot to do with the richness and complexity of my associative connections, the number, variety, and vitality of ideas that are percolating beneath my pia mater. I’ve got plenty of them under there right now, and short of a home trepanation there’s only one way I know to let them out.
I’ve got grading to do before that happens, however, and readings to read, and lessons to plan. I have the feeling (neither good nor bad, frankly) that I’ll need to find a bigger skull come summertime.
