Best laid plans are…well, never that well laid, it seems, when they’re mine. I managed to finish the proposal and the grading of the midterm, so that’s something. But my editorial duties and homework grading still await.
I wish I felt more relaxed. My kids have had a real break; I wish I could have had it, too. But jobs with real breaks don’t usually come with very good salaries, at least not in this society. So yeah. Thanksgiving grading and proposaling it is.
Some days, the job really feels like a job. It used to feel like such a privilege, and there are still many such days, but the longer I do it, the more frequently I feel the jobbiness of it all. That’s probably natural with any long-term job.
Someone asked in the comments to the November post why I remain in academia. I still owe the reader a full post, but for now, I think it’s because an academic job is still the best job someone like me can have. In no particular order: no direct boss, lots of flexibility with time, working with young people, working with smart and interesting colleagues, working on fun and creative projects, job security of tenure, good benefits. See, listing it all like that does remind me that my line of work is a privilege.
Tomorrow’s Monday again, so I bid you farewell, because that cheesy show isn’t going to watch itself before bed.
What do you do to unwind, blogosphere? Do you watch something? Read? Exercise? Bang head against wall until you pass out? Meditate?
xykademiqz 
Yeah, well, I read 5 books. They’re not even the 5 library books that I needed to attack, but completely different library books that I checked out online. (In fairness, The Last Graduate did come off my library wishlist and I HAD to read it immediately even though it didn’t resolve the last cliff-hanger and ended with a new one.)
Now I am regretting that decision as this week was already shot to heck with meetings and conferences and job candidates and so on. I did get a bunch of (mostly administrative/RA-related) stuff done yesterday evening after I finished The Last Graduate but my life would be better right now if I’d finished this referee report and polished/submitted the draft as I’d planned.
And instead of using this break in anyone being there for office hours to do anything I’m surfing the internet (in fairness, I did just finish reading the conclusion of the paper I need to finish refereeing…)
Oh – the last graduate just came off of my library request list too, but I punted it for another week because I also had a book binge over the last few days. I am looking forward to reading it next week. Apropos of nothing, best fiction I’ve read in a couple of months was Olympus, Texas.
To unwind… I swim. And watch television. And sleep.
Update: finished the referee report. Processed the editor paper. Submitted journal article. I may now be where I had planned to be this morning! Maybe I have a chance at making headway on this R&R I got over break even with all the meetings and talks and conferences.
@pyrope you have way more self control than I do!
My relaxation is mainly reading—either fantasy and SF books or the comments on r/Professors.
Last night, I sent the PDF and source files of my textbook to the publisher. When they asked whether I thought that copy-editing was needed, I said that it probably wasn’t worth the expense. This morning, a physics professor sent me 10 (TEN!) typos or corrections after reading only 60 pages of the book—the first corrections I’ve gotten in about 6 months.
I fixed the problems, sent the corrected files to the publisher, and said that maybe I had been too hasty in turning down copy editing.
Update 2: Paper was unsubmitted because they want figures as jpg, not pasted into a word document and a bunch of other ridiculous stuff like that which only matters if they’re going to publish it, but not at all if they’re going to desk reject it. I’ve come to expect that garbage for Taylor and Francis journals (where my RAs have spent multiple times dealing with their formatting garbage with multiple resubmissions only to be told that the journal was not a fit for the paper topic), but this was not only not Taylor and Francis, but their submission guidelines on the actual submission site do not include any of the draconian things it’s being sent back for.
If this is to lower submissions I’d much prefer they charge $50, though I guess somehow a day’s worth of stupid formatting that no other journal wants is somehow more progressive than charging money?