Friday, January 22, 2010

The Plan

I'm feeling sick today. Blah. It has been a very long time since I had a cold, and because I got sick this week--the first week in months when I haven't consistently been able to get 7-9 hours of sleep most nights--I have to admit that getting enough sleep clearly does affect my immune system. The upside of feeling sick right now is that I didn't really have plans for the weekend anyway. My engagement buddy Nicole and I are going to a bridal show on Sunday, but I should be feeling okay by then I think. (We haven't decided yet whether we're going there to mock it or whether we're going in the hopes that it will actually be useful. I think we'll just have to play it by ear and decide when we get there.) I have most of today to just chill out, though, and all day tomorrow to relax. Penn is going to be out of town all weekend helping one of his friends back home with a big home improvement project, so I'll be here by myself with my library books and a Netflixed copy of the latest Harry Potter movie (Penn and I took different flights to and from Europe and on one of those flights he got to see it without me, so I rearranged the Netflix queue so I could watch it this weekend. I love Netflix.).
I've given myself permission not to do any research or writing this weekend since I just came off of three straight weeks of work. I'm so very glad I took that class. It was grueling to be back in class after so many months of not taking one, especially since the class met every day Monday-Thursday, but I feel like I accomplished so much. First of all, I finally wrote the book review that you may recall was on my list of things to do last year. I've sent it off to one of my professors to review and then I'm going to submit it to the journal editor. As long as it's fit for publication--and, even as critical as I am of my own writing, I think it is--it will be published in the December issue! That's exciting. I've always wanted to have something published, and even though this is just a book review and not a book or even an article, it counts. I'm looking forward to the day I can type my name into the journal database on the library website and something pops up. My article itself is not completed, but I got a really good start on it and working on it gave me some good ideas for my dissertation so it was a useful exercise even if I never do end up working it into something to submit for publication (although I'd like to do that, too, eventually).
The class was good because it lit a fire under me and made me excited about my research again. I'd sort of lost my way on my project over the past couple of months. Now, however, I feel like I have some good ideas and an interesting direction in which to go. It's just a matter of making a plan and trying my hardest to stick to it. For the most part, I like the academic lifestyle. I like that I get paid to read and write. I genuinely get excited about research and, although when I'm writing I sometimes feel nothing but frustration, the "Now that is clever!" feeling I get when I occasionally write a really good sentence or paragraph is always worth it. There is one major problem with this job, though, and it's that I always, ALWAYS feel like I should be working. The guilt almost never goes away. While I love my extremely flexible schedule and will be sad to give it up if and when I have to, I'm also envious of people who go to work 9-5 and then just come home and get to relax (or maybe not relax, but run errands or whatever) knowing that their job for that day is finished. No matter what I am doing, no matter where I am, my job is not finished. I can finish individual projects, and that's always a great feeling and gives me a temporary sense of accomplishment. But as soon as I finish one thing there's something else I should be doing. Case in point: I finished my class and I finished my book review, but now I have fellowship and grant application deadlines looming and I told my advisor I'd get him a prospectus draft two weeks from today. As long as I am a student or a professor, this is what my life will be. There will always be articles to write and books to work on. Even if I end up at a job where a research agenda isn't emphasized, I imagine my life will pretty much always include lesson planning and grading. So, while I'm okay with dropping the work to spend time with Penn or friends or just to relax and read magazines for a while, it would be nice to get the nagging "But what about work?" feeling out of my head entirely.
So my plan this semester is to try to enforce an actual work week. I managed to do a lot during my comprehensive exams because I would close myself in my home office every day and work. Yes, I still spent some time fooling around on the internet, but mostly I worked well in there. Since I have the office, I'm going to use it. My plan is to get up when Penn gets up in the morning (around 7:30) and then work out and then spend the rest of the normal work day in my office. I realize I'm still going to have to be very flexible. I think I'm going to lose Monday afternoons to my baby-sitting job and I need to go to campus a couple of times a week to do my TA stuff, but I think if I can make a good effort to work while Penn is at work then I can relax in the evenings and on weekends knowing that I honestly have been working hard and doing the best I can. Even if I can work on the dissertation for a solid, uninterrupted three or four hours a day that's more than I'm doing right now. It's worth a shot. And if I want any chance of finishing this degree sometime in 2011 (my goal) then I need to try something to improve my self-discipline.
For now, I'm going to take more cold medicine and then take a nap, I think. All this work talk has worn me out.

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