So why am I attending meetings and writing reports?

The good news is that I’ve got approximately three more days during which to do any college-related business; then we’re off to Paris for seven blissful weeks. The two of us, the computers, a select number of books, and the summer projects I’ve been dying to get to — and thousands of miles and many timezones between me and the administrative tasks that have been keeping me from it.

I always hate the first part of the summer, because it goes by painfully quickly and is always far more consumed by recovery and reports than I want it to be. But I’m working on reminding myself that far and away the bulk of the summer is still ahead, and that the next two months promise both relaxation and productivity to spare.

Just grading. Classes ended Wednesday, senior grades are due today, and graduation’s in a little over a week. I’ve been completely buried under a big pile of end of semester work for the last several weeks, and I’m just now beginning to see a bit of daylight around the edges. Unfortunately, once I emerge from the grading, I’ve got two desperately pressing projects that have to be attended to—one due June 1, which I’ve only barely begun—before I can really return to the kind of thinking and writing I want to be doing.

Soon, though. That much, I’m feeling optimistic about.

So, we were able to get out and take a bit of a walk and have a little lunch, and the walk and the lunch seem to have gone well, not least because I was able to put my finger on exactly what’s had me feeling so stifled and on the cusp of depressed. R.’s illness hasn’t exactly been either of our idea of a grand vacation, but he’s been an excellent patient to take care of, and he really is recovering, and we’ve actually had a fairly good time through the midst of it, tracking down ginger ale and watching TV in bed. Plus, we’ve got an amazing hotel room, on the corner of the hotel, with not one but two balconies overlooking the Pacific. And, as folks who know me reasonably well know, there’s nothing I like better than holing up in a hotel room, away from my regular life, and getting some work done. So what’s the problem?

In a word: grading. I brought two batches of midterm papers with me, and they’ve proven somewhat demoralizing. Not just in the level of problems that they evidence (though that would be bad enough), but in the amount of time that it’s taking for me to comment adequately on them, in order to explain both what the problems are and why they must be taken seriously. I’ve been working fairly studiously on them (inbetween ginger ale runs) since our arrival on Friday, and I’m still less than halfway through batch two.

Which is hugely depressing because I’ve got so many things that I want to be working on—the outline for my current project; the syllabi for next year’s classes; MediaCommons-related stuff; general blogging. I want to write! I want to read! And instead I’m completely bogged down in the one part of my job that I genuinely dislike.

So whininess ensues. The only way out, however, is through, so I’m gritting my teeth and ducking my head and getting back to it. Wish me luck.

Two of my favorite things in the world: spring break and Hawaii. Neither has quite panned out, this go-round.

Earlier this semester, during the height of the negotiation-related stress, I made the decision to cash in a bunch of miles and surprise R. with a trip to Hawaii during my spring break. The timing seemed good; Hawaii is where this blog was born, and it’s returned there fairly frequently over the last several years. It’s a good place for decompressing, and a good place for the odd productivity of the working vacation. Plus, this time out, we had a lot to celebrate. We had high hopes.

And then R. arrived in SoCal Thursday night, preparatory to our Friday morning flight, not feeling so great. Feeling pretty crappy, actually. Running a 102-degree fever, in fact. My immediate thought was that we shouldn’t travel—we could get the miles redeposited, stay put in Claremont, spend the week being still and watching the new TV DVDs I’ve gotten lately, and just attempt to ride out whatever bug had gotten him. He wanted to try to make the trip, though, and was convinced that it was just a 24-hour thing. And, in fact, the next morning when we woke up, his fever was way down, he was able to eat a bit of breakfast, and so we got on the plane.

It was not just a 24-hour thing.

R.’s had what I can only figure is some sort of very slow burn norovirus. The fever mostly subsided, moving between normal and 100-ish, but the nausea and its unmentionable cousins gradually intensified over the course of three days, and so Sunday morning I got him to go to a clinic, where they gave him an IV with anti-nausea meds, gave him two more prescriptions to deal with the symptoms, and sent us back to our hotel with instructions for a very restricted diet to be followed for the next few days.

The good news is that he’s gradually getting better, but is nothing like up to speed yet. The other good news is that, so far, at least, I seem to have been spared. But spring break has mostly been spent in our hotel room, with me worried like crazy and him in various stages of pain, discomfort, and unconsciousness. We’ve both gotten a lot of sleep, which is good. But it hasn’t been restful. And it hasn’t been celebratory. And it hasn’t been productive.

We’ve got a couple of days left, and so I’m hoping that his recovery will accelerate from here. In the meantime, I’m trying not to plunge into the depression I see beckoning at the edges of my vision.

Perhaps after I finish with this week’s four department meetings and two program meetings. Not to mention the departmental social event, and the conference call, and the two one-on-one meetings, and the lecture.

And then there’s that little teaching thing I do sometimes. Today, we wrapped up Gravity’s Rainbow. Wednesday, it’s on to Underworld. And then there’s the other class.

So yes, I do intend to start blogging again. Right after I manage to get myself “caught up” (or so I’ve heard it called), and also get “a full night’s sleep” (ditto).

This is supposed to be a relatively slow week, the quiet before the storm: classes end tomorrow, and I won’t have any substantive grading to do until Friday, most likely. Pre-registration is done. Meetings are winding down. I’m supposed to have time to do things like, say, write on this here blog, which I’ve been ignoring dreadfully of late.

Instead, I’ve got an article for a conference proceedings that’s due tomorrow, which deadline I’m becoming increasingly unlikely to meet, and then I’m giving a talk at the Art Center in Pasadena on Friday, and I’ve got to get that ready. So there’s unlikely to be much from me here, unless I get caught up in posting bits of what I’m doing elsewhere. Witness the next post, which I’m separating from this one for no reason that I can articulate at the moment…

While the panic has subsided (in no small part due to my having woken the fuck up and said NO, thank you, to a new administrative task that I was being asked to take on), my workload has not diminished.  If anything, the stack in front of me has grown in the last week, and exponentially.

And so I’m at it, reading big piles of stuff, writing letters of recommendation, conducting interviews, producing reports.

Oh yeah, and thinking about how it might be a good idea to write the presentation that I’m going to be giving at the conference I’m going to this weekend.  That too.

The funny thing is, is that I’m doing all this writing about blogging these days—the BlogTalk talk, the Claremont Discourse lecture I gave last week, and now the blogs-as-learning-management-systems talk coming up in Portland.  But the more I write about blogging, the less I seem to do it.  And the long-range forecast for the blogging thing isn’t really looking so great right now.  I’ll hope to get back in the groove here soon; the longer I’m away, the harder it is to get going again…

It’s not to be helped or avoided at this point:  it’s my birthday.  The first one I’ve really dreaded in about… well, in pretty much precisely a decade.  Interestingly, it’s not a big round number type birthday, but the one before it, which to my way of thinking is worse, apparently.  Turning 29 stank: it was nothing but a year-long reminder that my twenties were almost over, and that, being still in grad school, I hadn’t gotten much of anywhere, that decade.  Turning 30, however, was fabulous:  a whole new decade, wide open before me, with endless possibilities.  And it turns out to have been an appropriate start to what’s been a great nine years.

But now, here I am at the birthday before the big one again, and while my angst this time out has nothing to do with any feeling of lack of accomplishment (even I’m not that silly, particularly not this summer), I’ve still got that end-of-things feeling.  Perhaps I’m deluding myself into thinking that I’d rather be turning 40.  Perhaps next year I’ll feel worse rather than better.  Perhaps this is just the way of birthdays at this age.  But I’ve nonetheless got a touch of the bleh today.

I’ve planned myself a good day, culminating in my flights back to SoCal.  So tomorrow morning, this long bout of travel and the aggravation of turning 39 will be over.  Instead, I’ll be in the thick of the pre-semester startup, with little time for such whining as this.

Suffering a bout of post-travel flatness.  Wishing to be back in bed, or perhaps under it, where it’s darker.  Will hope to resume normal operations shortly.

Massive muscle spasm, just left of my right shoulderblade, as I was sitting here writing an email message.  Can no longer raise my head.  Have cleared my schedule until 4 this afternoon, so muscle relaxers are imminent.  But infuriating:  today is one of my too-few thinking days, and it kills me to have it so disrupted…