Excel in the academia (with the abundance paradigm, kindness, co-creativity and joy)

here for 2009-10. I’m so glad. I think it’ll be so much easier to be here for a second year, knowing how everything works and already having friends/a bank account/a checkbook/a social security number/a phone/a burlesque teacher/a feel of Chicago.

A new chance at excellence, then!

1) turn off wireless again until lunch hour tomorrow
2) writethinkwritethinkwritethinkwritewritewritewrite
3) have tea
4) repeat steps 2) and 3)

I’m supposed to stay off 43T until the Big Application is done, but I think if I do this during my lunch hour, it’s ok. I need to write a little in order to find out what I’m thinking.

I had a coaching meeting today, and I felt I was partly going around in circles, not being able to articulate and make clear to myself why I had such problems about making decisions about certain things (the two emails in my Action folder that have remained unanswered the longest, and then veering off to what I should do next year here and what I shouldn’t.) So, an attempt at understanding…

I have conflicting fears: That I’ll waste away this opportunity of working just on research for another year and a half – a very rare and much envied opportunity for academics. But, also, that I’ll waste opportunities that are offered to me here to teach and to tutor. Not only because of CV building, but because I’d like to reach people, to open students’ eyes to things I think are interesting, even to… influence the world a little bit. And to feel more a part of a community than I’ve been doing until now.

There’s a theory that we are here to live, love, learn and to leave a legacy. I think I’m being kind of proactive in the fields of living and loving. Although obviously life is not absolutely great in those areas right now, I know I am taking steps to create a life I want. But, learning and leaving a legacy… I don’t have children and it looks probable I might not ever have any of my own. Books I write and students and colleagues whose minds and lives I touch will be my legacy. And I want that legacy to be the best I can leave.

I know I have been doing less than great on the learning (and excelling) and the legacy-leaving since I stopped being a lecturer last summer. And, I’m trying to figure out… is life, for me, something that should be fully rounded and balanced every week, or every month? Or something where the balance is achieved through periods where one concentrates more on one or two aspects of it at a time, even if that’s at the expense of others?

The latter choice seems more humane, more merciful in some ways – there’s no need to be perfect in everything all the time. In these times, a life conposed of several different projects one after another seems like a norm rather than an anomaly. And yet, I’ve seen unhappiness and dissatisfaction and a sense of missing out on things to result from the serial foci strategy, whether it’s staying at home with a child for more than a year or two (not working on any other projects), or prioritizing career success over relationships and happiness. So, I really don’t know. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in different time perspectives. Neglecting important stuff for other important stuff is ok for a limited time. It must be, because life is organic and flowing. But, somewhere between six months and two years, maybe (I’m just trying to figure this out for myself), it is not ok to live only a partial life. What if I died tomorrow? What if I died in six months? What if I died in six years? All those perspectives on what I’d want my life to have looked like should be there all the time as I live my everyday, maybe.

is due Jan 30th for the most important grant application of the year – I’m hoping to return back to 43T after that, but right now I need to focus really really hard on reinventing everything I want to do in the next three years, in which order, why and how. (The referees last year were not impressed by the previous plan – they thought it was interesting and innovative but implausible and badly worked out.)

I got shaken out of my completely unexcellent work lethargy that has been going on for months and months and was really beginning to kill me by two very very good things. First, some excellent coaching. And then, two anonymous referee reports on a book I have an essay in. The first says, among other things, “On the strength of the abstracts, the essays by X, Y, Z and [Wildcranberries] in particular appear to break significant new ground – I would certainly want to read them.” And the second says “Where there is representation of emergent scholarship, as with the inclusion of [Wildcranberries], again the editors have chosen the very best – Wildcranberries’s work (I have heard her read papers in the States) is very fine.”

This means so much to me, that two expert people who are not from Bohemia and obliged to like me and my work, like it. I have been so very unexcellent for such a long time. And I want to be excellent, and was scared I was all out it. Now, I want to live up to this idea of myself as an ‘emergent scholar’. And I want to do fine work.

I gave a talk tonight at another university here, invited by a professor I met last spring at the conference in Georgia. Obviously, it’s Halloween (great planning) so I expected maybe 6 people to turn up. But there was a very nice crowd, the paper went quite well, the audience seemed to really like it and the questions afterwards were also fun. I talked with the department head on the way to dinner afterwards and she seemed to think universities here in the States would be happy to hire me – I certainly didn’t ask or beg, but she volunteered that her department didn’t have a full-time job to offer for the next academic year but that if I was interested, they could definitely “cobble something together” and that we should stay in touch. So I’m kind of amazed and shocked… this is great! I certainly wasn’t expecting job offers based on this one little talk, but I seemed to be in the right place at the right time.

I’m such a durned lucky woman. If I hadn’t sent my paper to the Georgia conference last December way past the cfp deadline and still been accepted; if I hadn’t been placed in the same research group as the VIP professor in the conference, I wouldn’t have been invited to give the talk tonight; and if the department head hadn’t happened to be there… I don’t know if anything will really come from this, but I’ve got renewed confidence in that what I’m doing seems to be something that interests others, too. Happy!

This was an odd megaconference which means most of the papers were outside my areas of expertise. Met a dear Bohemian friend and discussed her latest conference romance, took a nap during some important papers, was bored by others that should have interested me, got inspired by a few that were completely off tangent, escaped one cocktail party in order to get some sleep, ended up having an after-after-afterparty in my hotel room the next night, charmed a panel, didn’t get to eat proper dinner two evenings in a row, ran on a treadmill for the first time ever, saw some fall foliage and Pennsylvanian suburbs, had a great conversation with Turkish taxi driver who gave me references to poets I should read and half of my tip back, got a ride home in Chicago from an important professor which was very nice.

Yesterday: A miniature version of the same. Thursday-Sunday this week: The same all over again. I’m really building stamina here.

Thu-Sun, but I don’t have a paper of my own so it’ll be just checking out what’s ‘in the air’ at the moment in my field. Several colleagues/friends from Bohemia will be there, too, and it will be fun to get to see them again.

Oh – I should pack! I need to get up in the middle of the night since I have an early morning flight.

and gratefulness. I have been figuratively walking in circles, not quite finding an entry point to my new research, and not quite actively, mindfully waiting for the work to begin either. And then today, I got a push in just the right direction from a great good friend, and suddenly I can see the road to the garden – forest, maybe – I need to go and explore. I love the adventure that is research, but I forget it sometimes. Dust, and laziness, and boredom, and overfamiliarity. But the new topic – it’s exciting and adventurous and bold, and I can take it and fly with it, I think.

To live in one land is captivity,
To run all countries a wild roguery.
Waters stink soon, if in one place they bide,
And in the vast sea are more putrified ;
But when they kiss one bank, and leaving this
Never look back, but the next bank do kiss,
Then are they purest ; change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life and eternity.

application for the post doc research project sent in, powered by a lot of chai lattes and tea and complicated by the fact that I seem to get max one hour of uninterrupted internet access out of this crummy laptop. I don’t know – I’ve been doing this for the last five years, getting grants for three moths, four months, six months, eight months. I wonder whether I’ll ever have a permanent job with a proper salary again, after the Lecturer in Glamorousness Studies gig.

On the other hand, the freedom to go wherever I want kind of balances the insecurities of this life. It’s better to complain in Chicago than worry about life passing me by in Jockstraptown.

I will start working. Until then I will allow myself to still ‘settle in’ – which will look a lot like fine dining on Friday and a cool block party on Sunday :D