I was feeling a smidgen guilty about taking a one-week blogging vacation (although I’ve added bits and bobs over at Myspace, since popular culture never sleeps), but then I noticed that about 90% of the blogs I read have either a) gone silent for the summer or b) recently posted placeholders, notes that account for their own momentary absences. While I’m mildly worried about one anonymous blogger–he was slated to defend his dissertation in early May and hasn’t been heard from since–I’m more than happy to bide the quiet. It’s time for me to muster my mojo and see what the summer will bring.
Summer tends to be a tough season for me, mostly because I find myself adrift for a week or three as I try to get my bearings. Although my chair is one of the most wonderfully accommodating people in the world and can orchestrate magical two- or three-day weekly teaching schedules, I usually request a four- or five-day slate just so I can pencil in a building block to shape my days and ways. When summer comes and that structure crumbles, I need to fill in the blanks with a self-imposed schedule. While I am one of the more fantastical long-term projectors you will ever meet–I have some plans already slated (tentatively, I concede) for 2012, barring the apocalypse–my short-term sense of summer is more than a little fuzzy. Smilla’s sense of snow, in contrast, is spot-on.
This week will be the first of the season that is 100% commitment-free. I have no meetings scheduled (scholarly, social, or otherwise), I have no paperwork to file, I have no projects or proposals to complete (my earliest pending deadline is July 15th), and I have no pressing obligations to meet. I’ve got plenty to do, of course, but none of it comes with a ready-made structure or timetable. Worse yet, even if I finished up the season empty-handed, no one would know to scold me. Such are the perils of the self-determined life.
The upside, of course, is pretty substantial as well. I’m feeling refreshed and recharged from the semester already, and I feel pretty good about where I’ve been and where I’m going. I had the chance to catch up with some of my peeps in the past few weeks, and I hope the summer will afford me with the chance to get to know some lovely new folks I met near semester’s end. My anxieties about my most onerous upcoming obligation (the assembly of my case for early tenure and promotion) have been eased and allayed by a cadre of kindly colleagues, and the process of putting my portfolio together (and thinking seriously about my teaching, writing, and service since my arrival at Central) has come with a doubled satisfaction. On the one hand, I think I’ve put together a reasonably creditable record (a little sober retrospection is good for the soul); on the other, I’ve learned to accept (at least today–I’ll schedule more kvetching for tomorrow) that all I can do is make my case and let it go. That decision is out of my hands, and if it is attended by subsequent decisions that I’ll have to make, they’re not ones I need to be fretting about right now.
Right now, as a result, will require a little improv on my part. Let’s see if I can’t summon up some energy and get some stuff done on this sunny summer Sunday.
