It’s finals week. I have a mountain of grading.

I decided I would take it easy this week, so I am rested for next week, when I really need to push some papers out in the month before onerous summer obligations start. This planned week of rest involves grading, committee work, and trying to clear out the backlog in my editorial duties, a proposal review, a preproposal review, and two manuscript reviews. Said rest means I will spread them out and not do them all in one day.

My computer at work died. Which is fine, actually, as I’d never moved back into it after the pandemic. My home desktop is still my main desktop.

Once you are 100+ papers into your career, it’s hard to get excited about additional ones going out. They are exciting for graduate students, and necessary to keep the career going, but there’s a definite ‘meh, been there, done that’ aspect to it.

I had such a humongous class this past semester, I think it broke me a little, or a lot. All the accommodations, then makeups for COVID and other stuff like athletic meetings, and finally both COVID and accommodations… I wrote multiple versions of every test. It was a lot.

I still have a million pending grants.

It’s so important to get along with colleagues day-to-day. I don’t think we emphasize that enough, being in a functional department, where disagreements happen, people discuss issues, and then everyone moves on.

We all focus on external recognition and citations and accolades from people who barely know us, when so much of life satisfaction comes from what we do, or don’t do, on a daily basis. I think it’s helpful to remember this.

Given all the stuff I now have to do this summer, I am sad that I won’t have the time to spend on my extracurriculars (Academaze sequel and my novel). I hope at least one of them happens, though, probably the novel, as I’m more excited about that than I am about sifting though the blog archives, if I am being completely honest. But now that I wrote it down, I’m having second thoughts. Maybe the Academaze sequel would be more manageable? Decisions, decisions.

Speaking of the novel, even if I squeeze out 500-1000 words per day, which isn’t too hard, I should have a draft in a few months. Plus I have writer friends on this journey — gourd, that sounds cheesy; but I do have friends who are in the same boat, so facing similar challenges at the same time should be helpful.

I have fallen down the Bridgerton rabbit hole and have yet to find my way out. Season 2 is 🔥🔥🔥!

This post title brought to you by all the sneezing students in today’s exam.

How’s life/end of semester/2022 treating you, blogosphere?