Right behind me, on the floor before my biggest bookcase, rests my tenure and promotion dossier. I had to specially order the 5-inch binder that now serves as the repository for my work of the last three years, and all the perfunctory paperwork barely fits inside. To the left, in a separate pile, is a stack of photocopies precisely as tall as the Oxford Thesaurus. That’s the stuff I had to weed out of this year’s edition.
There’s still a micro-smidgen of work left to do–I have to insert one more page (and a correspondingly tweaked table of contents), write a one-page “please, oh please award me early tenure” cover letter, and await the arrival of five letters five ultra-kindly far-flung friends are going to write me–but otherwise I’ve closed the books on that particular chapter of my summer plans. I am predictably elated and deflated, although I reckon I’ll be rewound by tomorrow. I’m not really looking forward to five months of anxious anticipation.
I’ve been looking backward and looking forward a bit, evaluating what I’ve done and what I have yet to do. At bottom, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with my work of the past three years, although (as usual) I feel as though I left some gas in the tank I should have probably burned. I did a reasonably good job staving off distractions, doldrums, and dry spells, but I’d like to have more to show for the effort I did invest. I’m not a big fan of self-flagellation (I figure if I deserve a flogging, I should hire a professional), but summer seems to be the time to squeeze in a little self-recrimination. When September comes I won’t have time for it.
The summer has been pretty good to me. I adopted a hybrid workout regimen (an improvement on the version I would have attempted last year had I not ruptured my gizzard in the early going), and it’s done almost exactly what I hoped it would do. I’ll have to do some proactive scripting going forward, since I’ve packed on the flubber over the past couple of winters, but I hope I’m settling into the kind of body I’d like to keep for the long haul. I also had a long and lovely stretch of poetic productivity in June, one that quite nearly rounded out the collection I have in mind and also allowed me to take a more leisurely, circumspect approach to compiling the tenure dossier. Next week I’ll be balancing revision, reading for the fall, and syllabus design, and I look forward to revisiting the manuscript and syncing up my second selves. I’m also going to see if I can log a little extra sleep, if only for novelty’s sake.
With a little luck I’ll also be able to blog a bit more often. The coming semester will be a little lopsided, with teaching and committee work dominating the docket, but that should translate into plenty of nooks and crannies for casual prattle. Spring promises to be my most leisurely session to date, with two classes to teach and no professional plans on tap as of yet, and I might just keep my obligations to a minimum. I’ll be awaiting more serious news–the fate of my separate application for promotion to associate professor–and there’s no telling how my noggin will respond. I’m a patient feller, but enduring long stretches of suspended stress is not my strongest suit.
Not much to do but soldier on. Today and tomorrow I’ll log a little idle time, but come August I’ll need to summon up a new supply of ambition.
