the grid

the grid

Sunday 23 October 2016

Week 6: Carrying It With You

Hi TLQ-ers! I'm sitting here at the airport, waiting for a delayed flight (and fighting off a bout of imposter syndrome) as I head for another state to install an exhibition - which is coming with me as my baggage. I'm thinking about the cross-over between real and metaphorical baggage, and that is prompting me to think about what we carry with us. In my case, I feeling bolstered by all the good wishes I know come along with these works. 

So what do you carry with you? Is it a material object, words of advice or wisdom, memories and feelings? What have you chosen to bring? Is there anything you want to consign to lost luggage?

allan wilson
1. Eat healthy foods 85% of the time.
2. Continue drafting bird paper - write up some results (with at least one graph) and contact lab guy.
3. Finish revisions to FS and send off.
4. Draft rough revision for WHK paper


Contingent Cassandra
--more work in garden: get things as close to ready for 11/15 inspection deadline as possible, including making at least one more bed and doing last sowing of winter greens.--get enough and as regular as possible sleep; continue to move sleep schedule earlier as possible --harvest parsley & make pesto--work food bought/harvested this week into meals--do grant project follow-up (emails; final budget distribution) --catch up with grading in preparation for upcoming trips--make progress on reading for professional meeting--finish travel arrangements: train ticket, one more hotel reservation, department paperwork--follow up with brother; catch up with stepsister and one friend--at least some Bible reading (probably will end up catching up after trip)--take one walk, even a short one, if possible. 

Daisy
Placeholder for back in 2 weeks after grant/grad students/conference/home stress clear.
Good luck and we hope you get some opportunities to at least put your ankle up and eat chocolate!

Dame Eleanor Hull
1. Self care: sit 4x, yoga 4x, basic stretching 3x, gym 3x for weights only.
2. R&R #2: 3 hours; make own list; collect/order books.
3. Translation-related thing: do it.
4. House/personal: do one of those financial things, 1 hour basement sorting, 1 hour filing, organize estimates on gutter cleaning.
5. Teaching: plan the rest of the term (possible change to one class).
6. Take care of TRQ so it doesn't distract me from TLQ.


Earnest English
Mental Health: Planning, stretching, mental discipline for inner freedom, meditation when needed, breathe. Try not to invest a lot of energy in hating hateful people.
Gardening: Clean up for party as much as I can???
Writing: 3 sessions of writing/revising; respond to others’ work; read for project
Health: sleep, rest, relax, take supplements, eat well, make sure to bring and eat lunch.
Cooking: one meal this week 
Planning: Spirited’s party: many tasks, including kitchen and bathroom cleaning; arrangements; stuff still to purchase; people to get in touch with
Spirited!: therapy and connect when I get home. 


Elizabeth Ann Mitchell (held over from last week)
Health
Call three doctors for appointments. 
Continue physical therapy exercises x 10
Improve eating habits, avoiding bad things x 5
Walk x 7 
Yoga x 1

Writing
Write one story. 
Prudence x 5 
Pierpont x 5 

Breathe, move like water, look for joy, and keep tilting!


Good Enough Woman (held over from last week)
Health: Exercise 3x. Make at least one overdue unpleasant doctor's appt. for myself. Making an appointment is SO hard. :( 
Home: Follow up about that dentist bill.
Research: Read one thing. Review submission requirements for article.
Family: Complete ~80% of Halloween party shopping and prep, including costume stuff. Order costume stuff for son. Get son started on Code Academy.



humming42
1 finish and submit Last Remaining if invited to do so
2 finish reading book 2 for review (I have some time to spend in non-places like waiting rooms this week)
3 finish chapter 5 references for Revised Book Project
4 be mindful about eating

JaneB
Bowing out of goals for the moment. Still looking for small moments of joy.

KJHaxton
1. find and read through paperwork for meeting (yay! trip to London!)
2. finish off plans for transferring my face-to-face teaching onto colleagues before 'sick' leave
3. continue prep for classes
4. make arrangements for outreach event for Hallow'een and in November

Karen *held over from two weeks ago)
This week (including another road trip): Theme - Attend to Now
1. Clean up bedtime transitions - electronics curfew, choose one intentional activity (sewing/knitting/music practice/yoga) for each night.
2. Read and note 2 x articles.
3. Use sit/stand desk transitions to cue stretching.


Susan
1. Write two paper abstracts -- one based on the paper I gave last week, one for a conference in March. 
2. Make plane reservations for next conference
3. Grade papers
4. Go through MS and check all citations to printed books in period; do printed primary sources if possible.
5. Do small admin task for department so it's DONE.


Waffles
1. Figure out moderated-mediation or mediated-moderation for NSF model
2. Work on darned intersectionality paper*
3. work on religion analyses

29 comments:

  1. Last week's results:
    1. Self care: sit 4x, yoga 4x, basic stretching 3x, gym 3x for weights only. YES, YES, ONCE, YES. Very good.
    2. R&R #2: 3 hours; make own list; collect/order books. YES, YES, YES (actually 3.5 hours, better than planned).
    3. Translation-related thing: do it. YES.
    4. House/personal: do one of those financial things, 1 hour basement sorting, 1 hour filing, organize estimates on gutter cleaning. NO, YES, NO, NO. As usual, I'd rather work on work than get extra house/life stuff taken care of. But the basement hour was productive.
    5. Teaching: plan the rest of the term (possible change to one class). SORT OF: the change is happening and syllabus/CMS are updated, but I still need to write detailed plans for myself to make sure we do the things I want us to do.
    6. Take care of TRQ so it doesn't distract me from TLQ. YES. As usual, some of these items are recurring or outstanding, but I'm keeping up.

    Plus Sir John and I had a nice Day Out yesterday, to a place that is new to both of us.

    Next week's goals:
    1. Self care: sit 4x, yoga 4x, basic stretching 3x, gym 3x for weights only, walk 10-15 minutes 5x provided the ankle's doing well enough. Go to bed by 10:30 7x.
    2. R&R #2: 4 hours. Finish paper?
    3. House/personal: do one of those financial things, 1 hour basement sorting, 1 hour filing, 1 hour garden, organize estimates on gutter cleaning, survive window-measuring visit. Maybe try again on having a single day devoted to house and personal stuff.
    4. Teaching: plan the rest of the term for undergrads; do fast turn-around on grads' research proposals.
    5. Plan something fun.
    6. Take care of TRQ so it doesn't distract me from TLQ.

    Topic: Baggage. I haz it. Mainly a sense of having failed to live up to my youthful promise. Two of my significant mentors/teachers have died this year, and I wish I had done more that I could show them, especially the first book (still in progress) that one of them inspired. I just keep trying to move forward, knowing that they believed in me, that Sir John believes in me, that my oldest friends think it's "cool" that I'm a professor and working on a book; and I try very hard not to think about the more productive (younger and more energetic) members of my department, because odious comparisons just make the whole thing worse. Eyes on own page. And I try to walk the line between making excuses and understanding reasons for why my life has taken the path that it has.

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    Replies
    1. Empathy here. I recently did one of those online mini-courses about enhancing your quality of life. First step was to set a global kind of goal around which all other activities and such could be oriented. My global goal is to live up to my potential. And this makes me cringe a bit, because I turned 50 a few months back and am not sure it's not laughable to have a goal like this at this age. Still trying to finish the first book, the late manuscript, and trying to make sense of what I want to do and why.

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    2. Much empathy here too. I keep noticing that the newer movies I enjoy are all about people who find themselves at midlife having failed at their big dream. I looked through a lot of my old stuff from my various grad school this summer and was so sad for all my unrealized potential and the faith that teachers and others had in me. Admittedly, there are reasons why my life has taken the path it has too. And I'm not sure I'd want to continue on that path, want the (work-dominated) life it would get me. But there's still a lot to grieve. I'm trying to keep my eyes on my own page too and keep paying attention to the line between grieving and wallowing.

      Hugs.

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    3. Much empathy here, as well. I had mentors who made much of my potential, although one did tell me I would have to "marry the library as a nun marries Jesus," which made me think again about that life. I also need to watch the line "between making excuses and understanding reasons" about the path my life has taken. Losing your mentors is hard--hugs.

      I also think about the saying, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans." Very little of my present life is what I planned in graduate school, but it has offered richness in unplanned ways.

      Humming42, I want to live up to my potential, and I figure I still have potential until I exhale my last breath. I firmly believe it is not laughable to have a goal like that at 50.

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    4. Thank you so much, Elizabeth Anne. And Earnest English. It's such a good reminder that I always, always have the opportunity to do what I aspire to. As do we all.

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    5. Yet more empathy here. I'm not sure my grad mentors had tremendously high hopes for me (in fact, I'm not entirely sure I had grad mentors, which is part of the problem), but there's definitely, at least in some people's eyes, a perceived mismatch between where I got my undergrad and grad degrees and where I've ended up professionally. I do think it's a matter of perception (and, in some cases -- mostly those of people I don't know all that well -- wishful thinking on the part of parents of teenagers/young adults who want to believe that getting into the "right" college is the key to a successful life, in some conventional sense). Looking at my actual undergrad and grad classmates, especially close friends, I see a lot of people, who are, like me, living useful but relatively unspectacular lives, with plenty of struggles, professional and otherwise.

      I've actually found the whole election drama to be something of a salve to these feelings, if only because they suggest that, even (perhaps especially) for women, new possibilities don't have to vanish in our fifties and beyond. I'm rather enjoying watching a woman who started a whole new stage of her life when she was about my age (after a pretty ghastly 8 preceding years) forging ahead into yet another new stage with considerable gusto. Obviously we're not all going to celebrate our 70th birthdays in the White House (nor, I suspect, do most of us want to), but there is at least an available counternarrative to the one that urges even more caution after fifty than before, since it's so hard for an older woman to find a new job.

      Or at least that's the lens through which I'm choosing to see the whole fiasco, now that the end is in sight, and things are looking hopeful.

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    6. Empathy here too. Not quite fifty, but definitely failing to live up to past or present potential, and feeling increasingly like 'the system' is set out to thwart my kind of potential from being realised. And then feeling terribly conceited to think that way...

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  2. 1. Eat healthy foods 85% of the time. MOSTLY. An improvement anyway.
    2. Continue drafting bird paper - write up some results (with at least one graph) and contact lab guy. YES, YES
    3. Finish revisions to FS and send off. NOPE. Opened the email, and thought it required more brainpower than I had at that moment.
    4. Draft rough revision for WHK paper. NOPE. Looked at my notes and sighed.
    Baggage. Yes. I have also a period of reassessment after having failed to live up to my youthful promise. Although, as I have reflected on this over the last year, I realise this is also a reflection on circumstances, family, the way life unfolds and so forth. About a month ago I decided to create a photo wall behind my chair in my work office. In front of my desk, I have lots of work notes on the wall, deadline lists etc- and behind me I have photos of people and events and reminders of things that matter in my life and inspired my work. This has worked well for me. It is essentially private, but not obviously so, and other people don't generally notice it because of the way my office is laid out. But I feel as though I am more solid, and the things that I value have 'got my back' and support me, without being too distracting. It's been an interesting psychological exercise.
    This week's goals - mostly repeated from last week:
    1. Eat healthy foods 85% of the time.
    2. Finish revisions to FS and send off.
    3. Draft rough revision for WHK paper.
    4. Abstract for conference
    allan wilson

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love the idea of the photo wall having your back, especially that it is somewhat private. A colleague of mine has plastered photos of her family all over her cubicle, which seems odd since she is not smiling in a single picture!

      I have a tucked away corner with pictures of my brother and my parents, and it helps to remember their support of my dreams and goals from time to time.

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    2. I, too, very much like your photo wall idea. In places where that won't work, less easily-interpretable reminders of people and events important to you (e.g. objects with less obvious meaning) might work.

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    3. I'm not good at photos, but I have a strange cat-fish-collage-object made by my niece when she was about six displayed quite discretely above my computer monitor - it's a stiff card cutout of a shark shape (as drawn by Niece) with "I love you Aunty Jane" written on it in wonky lettering, with a cat's face made out of several colours of card glued together (it has one flourescent pink ear...) attached above the shark's head, and a leopard print heart attached to the tail. It's incredibly bizarre, and I LOVE it - being Niece's Aunty is something I do without even trying, and she thinks I'm great at it (or did, anyway - as she approaches teenagerdom this will probably wear off!). I also have some small symbols on my noticeboard - a discrete original star-trek IDIC, a footprint which reminds me that life is a journey, and invokes various verses on that theme which I like, a photo of a landscape with a cute cat in it (there for the cat, to remind me there are cats in the world and they don't care about anything academic), a few postcards from favourite places... things that remind me there's more to me, and more to being valuable and valued in the world, than being 'a good corporate academic'.

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  3. What We Carry

    I'd like to consign to lost luggage my sense of comparison with others. On the one hand, I do know that it's pointless to compare one's self with others, that we all have our own path, but right now as one of my colleagues is on the rampage about everyone doing more scholarship, it's hard not to compare. It's very difficult to swim against the tide -- in this way and other ways too. (I'm thinking of being Slow in a efficiency-prizing corporatist environment.) I'd like to bring with me a sense of groundedness, of being rooted to the earth through whatever floors I'm on. I'm working on it.

    Last Week

    Mental Health: Planning, stretching, mental discipline for inner freedom, meditation when needed, breathe. Try not to invest a lot of energy in hating hateful people. OKAY
    Gardening: Clean up for party as much as I can??? DONE
    Writing: 3 sessions of writing/revising; respond to others’ work; read for project NO
    Health: sleep, rest, relax, take supplements, eat well, make sure to bring and eat lunch. YES
    Cooking: one meal this week NO
    Planning: Spirited’s party: many tasks, including kitchen and bathroom cleaning; arrangements; stuff still to purchase; people to get in touch with YES
    Spirited!: therapy and connect when I get home. YES

    Most of last week was just preparing for the party. Now I have grading - lots of grading. I need to still get my writing done too.

    Upcoming Week

    Mental Health: Planning, stretching, mental discipline for inner freedom, meditation when needed, breathe. Try not to invest a lot of energy in hating hateful people.
    Gardening: 1 hour of gardening this weekend (clean up? plant garlic?)
    Writing: 3 sessions of writing/revising; respond to others’ work; read for project; send off to deadline!
    Health: sleep, rest, relax, take supplements, eat well, make sure to bring and eat lunch.
    Cooking: one meal this week
    Planning: Figure out Halloween; grade day by day to prevent weekend-stealing
    Spirited!: therapy and connect when I get home.

    Move like water, grade like tortoise, everyone!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I like your idea of being grounded, of being rooted in some way. I need to work on that.

      My mother despaired of my gardening skills, but I am getting better. It is too easy for me to be too intellectual, and digging up all my plants to transfer indoors for the winter was great physical work!

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    2. Good work on resisting your colleague's rampage, which I'd guess is probably some projection of her own anxiety/ies on everyone else. But people who manage their anxieties that way are rarely open to being told that that's what's going on, or counter-argued in any other way, so it's a hard phenomenon with which to deal.

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    3. Aaargh colleagues on the rampage. Much empathy!

      In my case it's colleagues with new administrative responsibilities Attempting To Add Value by hectoring other people. GAH

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  4. What we carry: plenty I'd like to consign to lost luggage and I don't do too badly at that. I get frustrated when I think something has been dealt with but then reappears.



    Last week
    1. find and read through paperwork for meeting (yay! trip to London!) DONE
    2. finish off plans for transferring my face-to-face teaching onto colleagues before 'sick' leave Nearly Done, just need an actual 'you're now off' date
    3. continue prep for classes Done, ongoing
    4. make arrangements for outreach event for Hallow'een and in November partly done.

    This week (probably my last week 'in work' for the academic year)
    1. get lecture notes to the people covering my late semester teaching
    2. update my 'who is covering what' and ask for more helpers
    3. tidy up home office area and work out what needs bringing home from work
    4. try to deal with the appointments and paperwork and everything else being sick seems to create.

    Unfortunately yes, sick is actually big scary sick and illness that shares a name with a sign of the zodiac. Work has been the greatest distraction whilst waiting for tests, appointments, start dates etc and I'm entirely selfish in my working at home request: I need to stay sane and to do that I need structure and stuff to do. It sucks, but being useful makes it all suck a lot less.

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    Replies
    1. Sending positive thoughts your way, KJ. Staying busy is a good distraction, as is planning the trip to London, it sounds. Stay selfish.

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    2. Very best wishes for a not-so-scary outcome, and for strength in dealing with tests, treatments, and everything else.

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    3. Best wishes for successful treatment from this quarter as well, and for a good balance of the time you need to concentrate on yourself and the distractions/alternate focus you need to help you cope.

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    4. Very best wishes for the best possible outcome! And for lots of positives from a season of working remotely, distance from People Grief and plenty of opportunities to be useful along the way.

      I have a colleague who had kidney failure and spent years going to dialysis three times a week and waiting for a transplant match. He used to actually take OTHER PEOPLE'S marking with him to dialysis sometimes if he'd done all of his, he said it seemed to be the only thing which was effectively distracting enough. We were very slightly sad when he got his transplant and went back to only doing his own grading...

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    5. THinking of you. The world of illness is its own thing, and I wish you all the best.

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  5. What we carry with us:
    I’d love to consign my impostor syndrome and comparison with others to lost luggage. I had a full-on midlife crisis 5 years ago, nearly quitting my job and opening a yarn shop. I had hoped I had exorcised all my “not a real scholar” demons then, but getting older cuts both ways here. I am far more aware of what is important, but also far more aware of what I have not done. On the plus side, the frequency and severity of the struggles have diminished.

    Also, like EE, I despair at being a slow professor in a corporate-leaning university. I was going to say “scientifically based,” but I have no quarrel with scientists. I was also going to talk about the “MBAs running the place,” but my friends who happen to have MBAs have pointed out the distortions the bean-counters have forced onto business principles. I do have to have a talk with myself when I hear about colleagues who are churning out work by the buckets, and remind myself that it is not a competition.

    I’d like to keep in my carry-on the joy of words and language that I inherited from my parents. Even working with the textual notes, I enjoy finding ways to make them more interesting.

    Last week’s goals:
    Health
    Call three doctors for appointments. YES, even though I tried mightily to find ways out of doing this (Can’t I email?)
    Continue physical therapy exercises x 10 YES, and I am finding that the freedom from chronic pain now outweighs the pain from the exercises.
    Improve eating habits, avoiding bad things x 5 YES, even better, in that I was sick only once last week.
    Walk x 7 YES, even in the rain and wind gusts to 50mph! Brigid (the poodle) was in heaven--waterproof hair helps!
    Yoga x 1 YES, gingerly and very, very carefully, with resultant aches, but the good kind
    Writing
    Write one story. YES, a rough draft
    Prudence x 5 YES, I spent 5 hours on footnotes!!
    Pierpont x 5 Not quite, but I did find another article to read, read it, and summarized it.

    I have a conference for three days of next week. It is not really in my line of expertise, so there may be some time to hide and write once I’ve done my “I’ve shown up to represent the university” thing.

    Next week’s goals:
    Health
    Eat things that won’t make me sick, even while at the conference.
    Continue physical therapy exercises x 10
    Yoga x 3
    Writing
    Write one story.
    Prudence x 3
    Pierpont x 3

    Move like water, float like mist, everyone!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Baggage: like many above, I'd like to leave behind the sense of what I should have accomplished by now, based on where I was at 18, or 25. I'm actually not all that much given to comparing myself to others, but I do feel that I somehow haven't accomplished enough,even as I can easily list all the things that have made the last 20 years or so an exercise in coping as best I can (and accomplishing a good deal in some ways).

    In addition, I'm not sure I want to completely jettison my sense of responsibility, or Calvinist guilt, or whatever it is, but I would like to reshape/reframe it in a way that allows me to see things I enjoy doing (i.e. research and writing) as potentially useful/valuable to others as well as pleasurable to me. It's not like I think others' research and writing is frivolous -- in fact, I see much of the scholarship I encounter as contributing to conversations that are useful to/in the larger culture -- and I can even see how mine could do the same, but I'm a bit ambivalent (and that ambivalence has probably been strengthened over the years by telling myself, and having others tell me, that at least the kind of teaching I do is clearly useful).

    Last week's goals:

    -more work in garden: get things as close to ready for 11/15 inspection deadline as possible, including making at least one more bed and doing last sowing of winter greens.
    --get enough and as regular as possible sleep; continue to move sleep schedule earlier as possible --harvest parsley & make pesto
    --work food bought/harvested this week into meals
    --do grant project follow-up (emails; final budget distribution)
    --catch up with grading in preparation for upcoming trips
    --make progress on reading for professional meeting
    --finish travel arrangements: train ticket, one more hotel reservation, department paperwork--follow up with brother; catch up with stepsister and one friend
    --at least some Bible reading (probably will end up catching up after trip)
    --take one walk, even a short one, if possible.

    Accomplished: some catching up; some grading; some grant work; some travel prep; reasonably regular sleep (but on a later schedule than ideal).

    Not accomplished: more gardening; pesto (or much other kitchen work; bits and pieces of grading, the grant project, and travel arrangements; walk; Bible-reading.

    Analysis: I'm definitely at a point in the semester when I have trouble figuring out what to do first, and end up wasting time spinning my wheels (and then don't get out to do big projects, like the garden, or even up to do smaller projects in the kitchen). I've also got a little over a week of travel (interrupted by one day of teaching) coming up starting toward the end of this week, *and* we will probably get our first frost soon, so I need to get into triage mode.

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    Replies
    1. Goals for the coming week:
      --Get as close to caught up on grading as possible (the better to concentrate on workshop/conference)
      --Finish reading for next weekend's workshop
      --Finish travel arrangements for week after's conference (get train ticket & sign dept. paperwork once it's ready)
      --Catch up/take care of some business with stepsister
      --Follow up on grant-related financial task
      --At least cover parsley & greens(harvest & make pesto if time)
      --Try to enjoy weekend workshop (which will be my first night away from home in almost a year. I'm not a huge traveler, so the lack of travel hasn't been a hardship, but I do look forward to the shift in perspective that getting away can bring)

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  7. I could fill some suitcases! At the moment, I’m interested in packing a bag of pleasing others and worrying about other people being angry with me and leaving it at the airport. We all need a good baggage handler to get this stuff off the endless baggage claim carousel.

    Last week:
    1 finish and submit Last Remaining if invited to do so: no reply email from journal contact, so I wiped that one off the project board. It was an extension of a short piece that’s been accepted, so I haven’t invested much that was wasted
    2 finish reading book 2 for review (I have some time to spend in non-places like waiting rooms this week): I have about 15 pages left. Looking forward to being finished with it.
    3 finish chapter 5 references for Revised Book Project: nope
    4 be mindful about eating: yes, but not quite interested in acting on it


    This week, I’m going to try a different model for measuring goals, since I really want to figure out how to make these things I value and enjoy part of my everyday.
    1 write 4x
    2 read 5x
    3 online course 3x
    We’ll see how it goes!

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  8. I have a positive pantechnicon, never mind a case or two. At least I'll not run out of stuff to work on for a few years yet! The one thing that I would hate most to have happen is if I stopped growing, changing, learning. And one way to see burdens ("gifts, goods, a basket of bread/that hurts my shoulders but/closes me in fragrance. I can/eat as I go") is growth opportunities!

    I'm still struggling with TRQ never mind TLQ, and my cold hasn't gone away (I should make a Drs appt in case I have some kind of secondary infection, but I have no energy and I'm still sleeping badly, which is partly why TRQ is proving too much, and I don't want to get the usual lectures or to waste their time).

    I'd like to get rid of some of the voices, the things Bugge Spray is designed for. Not all of them, just the ones which have imaginary conversations with other people or assume others are judging me harshly or that a badly typed email could quickly spiral to me losing job and livelihood and house and living under a bridge in a box. I lug around with me a wonderful rag-bag of quotes and ideas and mental snap-shots and sparkly moments and passing interactions - somewhere in there it's always a perfect Autumn morning and my brain is firing properly. I need to both keep tossing stuff in there (recognising moments of joy, capturing fragments of inspiration) and keep dipping into it when I feel bad or down. One day I'm going to turn it all out and make me the most amazing quilt! (perhaps that novel or memoir we all like to imagine we have inside us. Is there a market for a memoir of mediocrity-inside-the-academy?)

    This week I'm going to try and referee a paper, eat sensible food in the evening (I've been getting in, shattered, eating a couple of pieces of toast or some crackers, feeding the cat, and either going to bed or sitting around surfing the 'net until I fall asleep. At least I should heat up a tin of soup...)

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  9. I recently began watching the HBO series "Westworld," the premise of which is that there is a place (amusement park?) that is inhabited by androids. People come to it to live out their fantasies - they can pretty much do anything they want there, and anything they want to the androids. It gets dark, but after the first episode, I was thinking about what it would be like to live someplace where everyone acts as though you are the best, smartest, most attractive person ever (as the androids treat the humans in some parts of the park) - how would I be different if that is how I was treated, or how I expected I would be treated? I feel like I would behave substantially differently - and so my baggage would be to get rid of at least 50% of my worries about how people perceive me and my fears of how they perceive me. I wouldn't want to get rid of that altogether, as there are positive sides.

    Last week's goals:
    1. Figure out moderated-mediation or mediated-moderation for NSF model - DONE
    2. Work on darned intersectionality paper - NOT DONE
    3. work on religion analyses - DONE

    I spent a long weekend in DC (visiting an aunt with alzheimers - it was pretty depressing), so this is a shorter week. Goals:
    1. NSF grant (get full draft done)
    2. RSA abstract
    3. religion paper - work on edits

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    Replies
    1. I have often thought that the reason I would like to be at a higher-powered school is so that I'd feel I had more to live up to. No doubt there are downsides, but my fantasy was always that my colleagues would expect me to be brilliant and so I would be. I agree that just getting rid of the worries about others' perceptions would be very useful.

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