In which I bemoan the absence of posting;
In which I gripe about being so busy;
In which I broadly hint that all the interesting things are unpublishable;
In which I promise a course correction;
In which I suggest great things to come.

Let’s call it done. I’ve got other stuff I need to do.

What little I managed to sleep last night, I spent dreaming about being exactly where I was, in the room where I was sleeping, in the house that I was in, waiting for the meeting that I spent the day in today. I find that kind of dream exhausting; you spend the night thinking you’re awake, only to find out you’re not, but perhaps you may as well have been, for all the activity you undertook. Between the jet lag, the decongestants, and everything else, it was a pretty non-restful night. But today has been miraculously productive; here’s hoping tomorrow continues the trend.

My technologies are suddenly making me very nervous. Yesterday, at the end of a very long and stressful day, I came home and found my laptop open — I was quite convinced I’d closed it before leaving — and Skype running on the screen. And I absolutely know that I had not been running Skype before I left. Now, granted, I had a conference call earlier in the day, one we’d hoped to conduct that way, but one member of the group wasn’t Skype-able, so we ended up using phones. And I was in the office. Could somebody attempting to Skype me when I didn’t have the program running have triggered it to start up? It’s either that or the cats are chatting when I’m not home, because I choose not to think about any other alternatives.

Then, just now, I came into my office to drop some stuff off after class, and used the speakerphone to dial down and see if a colleague was in his office. And noticed that the red light labeled “MIC” was lit on the phone. Which it has never ever been before. And when I hung up from the speakerphone call, the display was flashing “MIC.” And so now I’m just paranoid enough to wonder whether somebody could have turned on the microphone in my desk telephone for nefarious purposes.

As if that’s not enough, I now have to go check on my program’s library, which somebody apparently attempted to break into yesterday. I could really stand it if the world gave me a little less to be nervous about.

It’s prospie season, round these parts, and the campus is full of admitted students and their families, who are going to various panel discussions, browsing through department fairs, and attending classes. Both of my classes this morning were prospieful — 7 or 8 in Intro to Digital Media Studies, and something like 20 in Race, Gender, and Science Fiction. It’s great seeing the excitement of these students as they’re pondering the possibilities ahead of them — and it’s particularly nice seeing it right now, with three and a half weeks to go in what’s been a long, hard spring. That’s one of the beauties of this environment, if you ask me: a continual sense of renewal, of looking forward.

The other joy is the return; alumni weekend is in a couple of weeks, and — at least according to the alumni association’s “who’s coming?” list — several of my former students should be showing up. The class of 2003 is a particularly important one to me; they were first-years in my second year here, so they were the first class in which I was assigned advisees. Their first year was also the one and only time I’ve had the opportunity to teach our first-year seminar, and though that class was in some ways a deeply painful one (not least due to its 8.20 am time slot), something like six out of the fifteen students in the class became my advisees, and the seminar itself later morphed into the Race, Gender, and Science Fiction class I’m now teaching.

It’s the circle of academic life, I guess, or something else equally schmaltzy, but boy the sentimentalist in me just loves these moments…

But no actual cats. I saw this animation the other day, and something in it resonated so deeply that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s viral, I think, in an infectious way. The only thing that’s left is for me to pass it on.

I’ve been writing up a storm in whatever stolen moments I can get, and working like a fiend at every other hour of the day, with the exceptions of the ones where I sleep (not enough, and not terribly well) and the ones where I watch season 5 of The Wire, which has completely and totally broken my heart this season by being so devastatingly good that I cannot bear the knowledge that I’ve only got one more new episode to watch ever, and In Treatment, which I began watching out of mild formal curiosity (how long can a narrative series that’s on five nights a week hold up?) but have gotten quite caught up in.

Aside from those bits of narrative pleasure, it’s sheer madness: preparing for class, producing endless amounts of administrative paperwork, responding to ridiculous numbers of email messages. And, not least, event planning.

On the one hand, I hate event planning; I don’t like the kind of organization that it requires of me, I don’t like being responsible for a bunch of details that I honestly don’t care about, and I really, really hate having to wrangle people who temperamentally resist wrangling.

On the other hand, this week’s events — Thursday, the English department’s big annual lecture; Friday, a gala celebration for the Media Studies program, its alumni, and its friends; Saturday, a day-long symposium thinking about the shifts and transitions in media production and consumption being produced by the digital — promise to be amazing.

I intend to sleep all day on Sunday, if I can possibly get away with it. I’ll hope to have something new to say thereafter.

From the Broadsheet, without comment:

Bill Kristol: Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment — it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.

[Laughter]

Juan Williams: Not me!

Brit Hume: Bill, for the record, I like white women.

Kristol: I know, I shouldn’t have said that.

I’m off to the eye doctor, foax, which doesn’t bode well for the old productivity today. I’ll be spending part of what remains of the day in a meeting, and the rest of it trying to ignore the increasingly loud ticking of the clock. More later, I hope, when I can see the keyboard again.

Which is less anxiety about the semester, per se, than anxiety about the fact that the break between semesters is all but over, and that I’ve still got an enormous pile of stuff that really needs to be done before the spring gets fully underway. And this spring — yeesh — promises to be nuts: between, say, February 28 and April 5, I have four speaking gigs plus a conference I’m organizing here in Claremont. And that’s just five weeks out of the fifteen ahead of me, which will otherwise be filled with teaching an overload, advising senior theses, and the usual spring administrative insanity.

So the countdown has begun: a precious few days remain in which I can hope to get anything done. If you don’t hear from me, you know where I am.

Why is it that, even when I’ve realized that the book I’ve started reading isn’t the text I actually need to be reading — either it doesn’t do the thing I thought it did, or it occurs to me that my attention would be more fruitfully placed elsewhere — I nonetheless feel the need to finish the thing before moving on to another book?