From my pal BT, comes word of a dangerous ripple in the blog/reality interface.  A couple of weeks ago, after my back-self-patting assertion of my general rockin’ status, BT generously defined the quality of that rockitude:

It is undeniable that you rock, possibly rocking harder than many so-called “Classic Rock” acts including but not limited to BTO, Rush, Foghat, and Cheap Trick. OK, maybe not Cheap Trick, but still, you have achieved a very high standard of rockage.

I was moved by this, moved sufficiently to enthuse about it the next day.

Thanks, everybody, for the kind congrats. They mean a lot. Particularly being compared to Foghat. Man, I haven’t even thought about Foghat in a decade, at least.

Well, there are consequences to everything, and apparently that whole equal-and-opposite-reaction physics thingy obtains here in the blogosphere as well.

Rod Price, lead guitarist and founding member of British rockers Foghat, died Tuesday in Wilton, New Hampshire, after suffering head trauma from an accidental fall down a stairway. He was fifty-seven years old.

Between me and BT, the culpability here is huge.  BT has forsworn even thinking about any living classic rock acts for the duration of this warp in the web.  I just want to go on record as saying that I don’t rock so much harder than any other rocking folk that the world should take it out on them.

GZombie wrote a few days ago about his concern that his blog had jumped the shark, and I’ve got to admit, I’ve been wondering something of the same thing about Planned Obsolescence over the last couple of months.  My concern is less that all of my posting has been personal of late (though there’s something of that in there, too) than it is that I just seem much less driven to post of late.  It’s much more rare, these days, for me to stumble across something and think “I’ve got to blog that!” In part, I guess, because my level of busyness makes it much less likely that I’m going to stumble across something.  And I’ve got less time for rumination.  And all of my scholarly projects are at the moment in the finishing-up stage, rather than the starting-up phase when it’s helpful to use the blog for thinking out loud.

What’s funny is that I miss it; I miss the rush of writing something new, of sparking a little bit of conversation, of seeing that conversation ripple outward and reflect conversations taking place elsewhere.  I miss that sense of connection most of all.

I’m sure this is just another common blog-phase—the crisis of confidence, the waning of passion, something.  And I’m sure I’ll get past it, once I can clear my head of the uninteresting but stress-inducing stuff that’s rattling around in there, once I can reclaim a little bit of time every day just to read, and think, and figure out where my interests are headed next.

I’ve been watching since the beginning of the year, I think—yes, in fact, my first sighting was Liz back on January 4—as first one and then another of my blogging pals have been overtaken by the Getting Things Done virus sweeping the net.  And every time I ran across it—somebody linking to 43 folders, somebody talking up Moleskine, somebody with a copy of GTD on her desk—every time I ran across it I’d feel this visceral yearning to know more.

I’ll admit this now:  I’m an organization freak.  I love folders, and boxes, and cubbyholes, and shelves, and labels, and so on.  Hold Everything used to be my favorite catalog in the world (only recently replaced by Levenger’s).  As folks who’ve been to any of my recent places of residence could tell you, I’m not the world’s greatest housekeeper, but what I lack in clean, I make up for in neat.  I can’t abide clutter, and I can’t stand not knowing where everything in my life is.  I’ve had a PDA since late 1998, and before that had a series of intricately organized day planners.  And I’m completely dependent on these calendaring systems—if I don’t write it down, I simply won’t remember it.  Period.

Despite all this, though, my life has this year spun completely out of control.  I’m teaching a full load of courses (which is an admittedly cushy 2/2, but at a very, very handholdy college), I’ve got something on the order of 30 advisees, I’m first or second reader on (I think) 8 senior theses, and—and these are the things that are killing me—I’m the chair of the Media Studies Program (for which I led a self-study this year) and the chair of the faculty Executive Committee (which has me pulling my hair out on a regular basis).

Did I mention that I have a book manuscript due to the publisher at the end of this month?  And that I’ve spent all year working on a second edited book project, the last pieces of which are also due to their publisher at the end of this month?  And that I’ve still got that overdue article—now two and a half months overdue—hanging over my head?

I’ve spent every moment since September feeling as though I was forgetting something, as though there was some small but crucial task that I’d left undone, that was going to come back to haunt me.  I cannot relax.  My sleep alternates between total oblivion—less like sleep than like getting knocked out—and fitful.  I dream about work nonstop.  And no matter what I’m working on, I always feel like I ought to be doing something else.

And the funny thing is, everytime I stumbled across GTD this spring, I’d think, “man, when I’ve got some time, I really need to sit down and read that.”

I don’t have the time.  But this week, after completely melting down in a whiny email exchange with an always supportive but in this case slightly taken aback mentor, I’ve decided that I don’t have time not to read it either.  Because I think I’m taking years off my life with stress right now.

Updates soon, from a calmer me, I hope.

Break has thus far been a great thing, though I’m appalled, as always, by the speed with which it is rushing past.  I’m holed up here in NoVa working my way through the book, trying to clarify a couple of key points.  Exhaustion, though, or at least general brain fatigue, is making it hard to hold those key points in mind as I’m reading, and so I keep finding myself just happily reading along without really worrying about whether the issues I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on are sufficiently at the foreground of the analysis.

Which, from a certain perspective at least, might be construed as a good thing.  Happily reading along, you know.

There’s little else to report, though.  I bought a novel at the airport (Dennis Lehane’s Prayers for Rain) and merrily read my way to MSP, through a two-hour-and-forty-minute delay, and on to DCA.  I’ve caught up on some sleep.  I’ve worked on the manuscript.  I ran yesterday, for the first time since the marathon.  And I haven’t touched that pile of grading I brought with me—not once.

Later today there will be a massage and a facial and other fun spa treatments.  And then there will be more work, and more after that.  That’s pretty much the course of things, I suppose, which makes the posting light and awkward.  There’s precious little to say when one’s interactions with the world are so narrowed.

The good news first:  I’ve finally gotten close to caught up on sleep.  I’ve managed to get through almost all of the dumb administrative tasks that have landed on my desk in the last two weeks.  And it’s officially spring break, so I’m packing up and heading to DC for the week.

The less good news:  I’m bringing a huge pile of work with me.  I’d expected to do that—the final manuscript is due to the publishers by the end of the month, and I’ve got one last chunk of text to produce for the anthology, also by the end of the month, so this week has some significant writing-oriented time pressures on it.

The worse news:  I didn’t get all the grading I had on my desk done this week, as I’d hoped I would, so I’m bringing that with me, too.  Sigh.

I’m headed for the airport shortly, and am trying to decide what I’m going to do on my flights.  There are three possibilities:

1.  In an effort to make the writing week as productive as possible, I finish the grading on the flights, so that I don’t have to think about it again all week.

2.  In an effort to prime the writing pump, I begin my read-through of the manuscript on the flights, thus jumpstarting the final revision process.  Grading can be done a bit at a time over the course of the week.

3.  In an effort to enjoy what little relaxation time I’m going to get this week, I buy a goofy novel at the airport, put all my work away, and just read for fun on the flights.  Doing so puts added pressure on the week, but enables me to start it somewhat more refreshed.

The responsible part of my brain is leaning toward 1, but I’ve got a feeling that I’m going to end up going with 3.  I’m thinking, at the moment, that I should just embrace it—take the day off, try to relax, and pick up the work week bright and early Monday.

Oh, yeah.  Things that felt perfectly fine 48 hours ago are now whining and complaining.  And my knees look like water balloons.  And I feel as though I could crawl into bed and stay there for a couple of days, given the opportunity.  But other than that, I’m doing pretty well, post-marathon.

I want to say that the race was a great experience, on the whole, but I’m not sure how much of that sense is tied to the fact that it’s over.  I can say with great certainty that somewhere between miles 19 and 23, I had one very clear thought:  “This was a terrible idea.” That began to fade, however, almost as soon as I finished.  It’s not for nothing that Frank Shorter once said “You’re not ready to run another marathon until you’ve forgotten the last one.” I’m not ready to run another one yet, but I’m beginning to see the faintest of glimmerings of the shades of ideas that at some point in the future I might contemplate doing it again.

What follows may be way more information than anyone other than me wants, but it’s here anyhow.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks, everybody, for the kind congrats.  They mean a lot.  Particularly being compared to Foghat.  Man, I haven’t even thought about Foghat in a decade, at least.

Thanks, too, to Ogged for his ups.  He’s not wrong with that epithet, I’m afraid.  I’m hoping that brainpower will return to something like 70% later today, so that I can post more details.  In the meantime, meg reports on her side of the story.

Before I go collapse, a quick update.  I had three goals set for the marathon (whose name I am able to speak for the first time in two weeks):

– The fairly-likely-to-make-it goal:  just finishing.
– The if-everything-goes-well goal:  finishing in under 5 hours.
– The pie-in-the-sky goal:  finishing in 4.30, which was of course Never Going to Happen.

My chip time, according to the lovely folks at marathon central was 4.32.56.

I rock.

Having rocked, I’m now going to go take a nap.  More on the race particulars, once I’m able to process information again.

There are not many moments in this post-Atkins world in which I can indulge in my most favored comfort food—macaroni and cheese—utterly without guilt.

I am having one of those moments.  And enjoying every blessed bit of it.

And trying very very hard not to think about tomorrow.

I remember these lovely moments from college, moments that continued into grad school, though without quite the wonder they’d earlier produced.  Moments at which it seemed that all my classes were suddenly speaking to one another, and I’d get a hazy glimpse of the ways that all forms of knowledge were in some mysterious fashion interconnected.  The grad school version of those moments of synchronicity was less thrilling, somehow, only because it was more expected; when you’re only taking classes in one department (and, by and large, classes focused on the literary production of one continent and in one century), such overlaps are inevitable.  In college, though, I felt a real shiver every time my history professor would mention the same writer or concept or event that my English and political science professors had independently mentioned just the day before.

I’ve never had one of those moments as a professor, for no other reason than that there are very few openings for the unexpected; the woman who writes the syllabus is hard to surprise.  Except when she’s not really paying attention.

Yesterday, my Intro to Media Studies class covered bell hooks’s “Eating the Other”; tonight, my Intro to Cultural Studies graduate seminar discussed the volume from which the essay came, Black Looks.  I didn’t plan it that way.  In fact, I didn’t even realize until this weekend that this was going to happen.

The conversations in the two classes were quite different, in no small part because the context each course had to this point created was pretty specific.  It was nonetheless fun to remember, however briefly, the excitement of those glimmers of interconnection among diverse fields, glimmers that gave me the sense that there was something transformative to be found in interdisciplinarity.

The feeling is fading already, though, I’m sorry to report, and I’m trying to figure out what to make of the sense of nostalgia—of loss—that is lingering in its wake.  I wonder if there’s something in the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity that robs it of its magic.  Once one teaches a course—worse, once one has repeatedly taught a course—entitled “Introduction to [Interdisciplinary Field],” have the pathways between subjects become so well-trodden that little room for exploration, and for the random connection, remains?